Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > Wireless Network problem. Help*******

[yeti]

Just fitted up a wireless network consisiting of 1 x Linksys WRT54GS wireless router and 2 x Linksys WMP54GS pci cards. On boot up with the router about 10 feet away and in line of sight, both computers reported "low" connectivity. Despite this the laptop picked up the network and worked quite happily in another room entirely and at least 20 feet away.

It is only when I put the router litteraly on top of one machine that it reports "excellent, whilst the other, which is all of two feet further away, reports "good".

I have tried reconfiguring the system, tried different channels and also tried the aerials in different positions other than vertical.

I was led to believe these cards have a "theoretical" range of at least 100 meters, so where am I going wrong? I can't believe BOTH pci cards are faulty, but given that the laptop works fine most anywhere, it would tend to indicate that.




If anyone can help me with this I would be eternally grateful. otherwise I'm gonna pull up a few more stumps and try not to drop anymore tree's on the garage when I chop em down! ooops......

[Murray Mint]

Yeti

You could try running the PCI cards in "Ad-Hoc" mode, this is basicly running a peer-to-peer network and will not use the the wieless access point for connectivity.

Have you downloaded the latest drivers, did you get any driver signing errors whislt you were installing the cards, also are you using the configuration utility that comes with the card or the windows XP utils?

Murray Mint

[yeti]

Murray

I need the cards to work thru the router so I can have internet access on all machines. Haven't yet downlaoded any new drives as I though that even with the old one's, the range should be better than three feet! I used the Linksys config utility to set things up. Only problem with that seems to be that all the config commands for the pci cards go through the router. The destructions supplied don't say of there is an independent utility for the cards, but then the destructions are s**t anyway!

[TP]

You definitely need to right drivers for these cards otherwise you'll get all sorts of inconsistent crap going on. Including the driver not reporting the signal strength correctly.

Download the right drivers, install them and try again

[JPM]

Have you got any other wireless stuff in the house? mobile etc? try turning all of those off, probably barking up the wrong tree but who knows..

Can you ping the router? what sort of response time are you getting?

As has been said try upgrading the firmware on the router and the cards, and drivers if available.

Have a look here there are some good forums etc

[Edited on 22-11-2004 by jpmercer]

[Murray Mint]

OK

First things first. Are you using XP? If you are then you can use XP to configure the cards. The reason that I suggested the Ad-hoc mode was to test the connectivity speed between the two PCI cards, maybe the two cards are shafted, and stranger things have been known to happen.

Murray Mint

[JPM]

Also any encryption going on etc?

[yeti]

Will look into all of that and report back.

[Murray Mint]

Vman

Please if you’ve got nothing constructive to add just go away, PLEASE? The people that are replying are only trying to help a fellow member out.

Murray Mint

[yeti]

Don't worry Murray, vman never adds anything constructive, it's just his way!