Signal Strength

I am on a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a Motorolla modem and a Microsoft
router. Until recently moving into a new home, everything was fine, and
running on "Excellent" signal strength. In the new place, I am almost always
on "Low" signal strength, and sometimes get booted offline. The router is in
another room than the computer, but is only about 15 feet away. I have to be
nearly on top of it to get better strength. My service provider says that it
could be physically blocked or there could be static... How can I increase
the signal strength so I don't get booted off? Could there be external
factors? Help!!! Thanks.

=?Utf-8?B?Q2FybHk=?=

On 27-Oct-2006, =?Utf-8?B?Q2FybHk=?= <> wrote:

> How can I increase
> the signal strength so I don't get booted off? Could there be external
> factors?

If it's a USB wireless adapter you can add a simple reflector, it increases
signal strength and reduces the angle of aceptance, so reducing
the chances of picking up interfering signals from directions
that are not in the line of site path.
NetStumbler is good for seeing what's around you that might be interfering,
what channels they are using, signal strength, SSID, whether secured etc.
Some adapters are not supported by NetStumbler.

Try swapping channels first on your router...most people leave it on the
default channel and you end up with a lot of interference.


<> wrote in message
news:...
>
> On 27-Oct-2006, =?Utf-8?B?Q2FybHk=?= <>
> wrote:
>
>> How can I increase
>> the signal strength so I don't get booted off? Could there be external
>> factors?
>
> If it's a USB wireless adapter you can add a simple reflector, it
> increases
> signal strength and reduces the angle of aceptance, so reducing
> the chances of picking up interfering signals from directions
> that are not in the line of site path.
> NetStumbler is good for seeing what's around you that might be
> interfering,
> what channels they are using, signal strength, SSID, whether secured etc.
> Some adapters are not supported by NetStumbler.

Carly wrote:
> I am on a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a Motorolla modem and a Microsoft
> router. Until recently moving into a new home, everything was fine, and
> running on "Excellent" signal strength. In the new place, I am almost always
> on "Low" signal strength, and sometimes get booted offline. The router is in
> another room than the computer, but is only about 15 feet away. I have to be
> nearly on top of it to get better strength. My service provider says that it
> could be physically blocked or there could be static... How can I increase
> the signal strength so I don't get booted off? Could there be external
> factors? Help!!! Thanks.

The problem could be caused due to Faraday caging or destructive
interference/multipath fading.

Faraday Cage:
Avoid having any large sheets of metal between the two devices. They
could be anywhere: in your walls, between floors, in the attic. These
would introduce partial Faraday cages around the transceivers, reducing
or blocking the signals altogether. The Wi-Fi waves are meant to make
electrons move in certain direction in the attenna of the target, but
if there is something else in between the source and target, then that
thing will consume the energy in the wave in having its electrons move.
Naturally, energy is conserved, so whatever energy is not reflective
off the metal is wasted heating up the metal. If the metal sheet is
thick enough and the penetration depth is small enough, none of the
wave manages to survive to the other side of the metal. [Penetration
depth is a measure is how short a distance is required going into the
metal to kill off the radio wave. Shorter distances means that the
metal is very good at killing the wave as it tries to go through.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

Destructive Interference/Multipath Fading:
Both 2.4GHz and 5.6GHz are frequencies high enough, having wavelengths
low enough, that multi-path destructive interference can easily occur
in your home. Destructive interference is where humps of sine waves of
Wi-Fi signals bounce around your house, reflecting off sheets of metal
until, when they arrive at the target,they have managed assume opposite
polarities and nullify each other. When the interhump distance is
short, there is ample opportunity for the humps to find pieces of metal
on their way from source to target, slam against the metal, invert
themselves. This phenomenon is exactly what would happen if you went to
your backyard, tied a 10 meter rope to an outside wall, sent a
travelling wave from yourself to your house by stimulating a hump with
a quick up-then-down vertical "jerk", and watching the hump hit the
(brick) walk, invert it self, and start coming back. Depending on how
far you are from the wall, the humps coming back from the walk
(reflected) might interfere with the humps going to the walk, and the
net result is that they would cancel each other out, to some extent.
Of course, the humps leaving your person would be stronger than the
humps coming from the walk, so the leaving humps would probably
overpower the weakened reflected humps, but it too would be weakend. To
calculate wavelength (inter-hump distance) see
http://www.1728.com/freqwave.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading.
You should get a result under 1 meter for the wavelengths both Wi-Fi
frequencies.

To see which one of these situations is the culprit, use the calculator
in preceding paragraph to calculate the distance between the top of the
humps in the Wi-Fi sine waves [Naturally, 5.6GHz is 5600 MHz, and
2.4GHz is 2400 MHz. Then, imagine the sine waves bouncing around off
various metallic planar objects in your house. Then move the notebook
around slowly, in amounts that are small multiples of the inter-hump
distance. Observing this, if the signal strength changes dramatically
for even short distances, the problem is at least mutipath fading. If
it does not, but changes as soon as you walk around a particular wall,
then the problem might be due to a partial Faraday cage (firewall in
your walls or duct work for AC).

Good luck,

-Le Chaud Lapin-