Wireless improvement

My wireless router is the Netgear WGR614 (version 1). For some reason, the range has started to degrade to the point that I disabled the wireless component. I don’t know why it’s gone down hill but it got to where I couldn’t a signal only 10 feet away through one wall. I used to be able to be two rooms away and it would work fine.

I now have a wireless AP that is awesome. It’s a Dell TrueMobile 1100 (Cisco Aironet 340). The range is amazing thanks to the AP having 30 mW of transmitting power. The AP is in my upstairs bedroom but I pick it up, with a strong signal, on the other side of my house while I’m downstairs.

This particular AP isn’t available from Dell anymore (from what I can tell). We had a lot of them at work that weren’t being used because they were upgraded to a new model. My boss heard me talking about how bad my Netgear was and he said “Just take one of these but you’ll have to reconfigure it.” Let’s see. Free AP but I have to reconfigure it? Sure, I’ll take it.

Reconfiguring it was easy enough. I used a 9-pin serial cable to connect the AP to my laptop and just used HyperTerminal. I went ahead and installed the latest firmware from Cisco. The configuration pages (web based or terminal) are easy to use and you have a lot of settings (WEP, VLAN, power, etc.) you can customize. You can even set one antenna to transmit and one to receive.

The only downside is that it only supports WEP but that’s ok. I’ll just change the WEP key occasionally. Maybe Cisco will release a firmware upgrade that will add WPA or WPA2.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. – Albert Einstein

26.Dec.05 Hardware, Networking