weak wifi signal help please, wifi boost?

[happyhero]

Hi I have a Netgear DG834GT wireless router and I am with Sky. I have an attic conversion in which I have my study/office. I have my main PC in this room hardwired into one of the router ports and I like it this way as when I get any connection problems I can see the router lights to help me get the connection back (doesn't happen that often). My family, between us have two more laptops in the house, but we often have trouble wirelessly connecting and from experience we can see that most of the problem is range.

Sometimes we go and stand in the ground floor hallway with the laptop to connect and then go back into the lounge and then the connection seems to hold on with the occasional break. Its is quite a nuscience having to walk round to get a connection whilst you are sitting there with all your bits round you and maybe even the tv on. We seem to have a couple of dead spots too where it is very hard to connect unless we keep on trying.

I have experimented with the usual, moving the router about, changing channels etc and none of that really helped, so I am wondering about boosting the signal. I have had a quick look on the net and see various booster aerials (are they any good) and devices that look like a router but are in fact a wireless range extenders and which are expensive.

I would be grateful for any advice on what works best and any experiences.

Moving my router away from my PC is not really an option I fancy, and I have got it sitting in the clear a few feet away from the actual PC to try and help.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[breezer]

think you will have to move the router.

is this loft conversion new?

i am thinking it has foil lined / backed plaster board which is cutting the signal

 

[happyhero]

Cheers for the tip breezer, you got me thinking now how best to get round this problem, did not think of that.

My study/office was built in the not too distant past and I know it does have foil backed plasterboard as I was around a lot when it was being built. The thing is though that all this plasterboard is on the walls and my wireless signal needs to travel downwards to the other rooms that have the laptops in them, so not sure if just having these foil backed walls around will still give me a problem.

There are some steel beams (just to make things worse) in the floor but these are fairly well spaced apart.

So now this has got me thinking, should I get a booster which I sort of fancy (heard they work well), or is there such a thing that plugs into the aerial socket of the router with a load of wire and then an aerial so that I could still have my router beside my PC as I would like but can put the aerial out through a little whole to another floor or something similar?

If possible I would like a real strong signal at the place where the laptop is usually used. Might sound obvious but after so long having a crappy signal, choosing what equipment I would buy, I would be strongly biased towards the thing that achieves this. I would guess the Linksys Expander would probably achieve this best?

 

[MarkBarl]

Your easiest solution would be to try and pick up something like a Netgear WG602 anything after v2 should do. I recently picked up a v3 for £15 on ebay. It has a repeater mode, that will relay your wireless signal. You set it up with the same security and SSID as your existing wireless and set it as a repeater. Put it somewhere in the house so that it still has connection to your existing AP and relays the traffic. It needs no hard wired connection (Apart from setting it up) just power.

 

[tim west]

happyhero there is an update for your router in the pipeline that will increase performance, hang fire.

 

[wanleg]

My study/office was built in the not too distant past and I know it does have foil backed plasterboard

There are some steel beams (just to make things worse) in the floor but these are fairly well spaced apart.

Sounds like you could be suffering from a combination of signal degradation due to the materials between the floors and/or multipathing

See if the firmware upgrade mentioned cures your issue first.

A different antenna is unlikely to give you the desired effect....the power output of the radio card in your router is fixed and cannot be increased, the different antennas allow you to propogate the radio coverage in different ways e.g. instead of emmitting a radio pattern that looks like a sphere some antennas will offer a pattern that is more directional.

If you get no joy with the firmware I think an additional repeater/access point is your best option as per MarkBarl's post. I would advise attaching this via Ethernet wired (homeplug ?) comms to your existing router if you can....just gives you more scope as to where you can site the unit for best coverage.

 

[tim west]

the update made a significant improvement to both connection strength and download/upload speed on my router.

 

[Hooo]

One thing to bear in mind with all the cheap wireless range extenders is that they only have one radio, and this has to talk to the master and your laptop - effectively giving you half the connection speed. Since the booster will improve your signal up to the point where it's useable, this might not be an issue for you.
Whenever I've extended wireless networks I've always bunged a better aerial on. I've found it the most reliable method. Since all the laptops are downstairs, get a directional aerial and point it straight down.
This assumes your access point has a removeable aerial.... and you need to keep the cable between the access point and the aerial under a metre or two, you can't run a long aerial cable otherwise you lose most of the power in the cable.

 

[happyhero]

Ok cheers guys for all your help. I am thinking that I will look into this firmware upgrade and maybe getter a better aerial to start with.

 

[mikeddavies]

An alternative which my son used, are the adaptors which use the mains cabling. He had the same problem as you and didn't want to take up floorboards and run cables. He used netgear kit and is very pleased with it. Just plug each (one per laptop and one for your router) into a mains socket with an ethernet cable to each - they recognise each other.
Not the cheapest but it worked!
MikeD

 

[happypig]

A friend of mine has a Bed and Breakfast in Hastings. The have the same router and had poor coverage in some guest rooms (the house has 6 floors).
I fitted a high gain (9db IIRC) antenna to thier router and now they get pretty good coverage in most of the house.

 

[robbobob]

another option that might be worth having a go with is just to change the aerial position from a vertical one to an horizontal one. The signal from a stick aerial can resemble a large donut (but with not much hole in the middle) so you cover left-right better than up-down. Doing this will mean that you lose signal sooner horizontally (not a problem in most houses), but the signal should do a better job at getting to your ground floor.

Even if it doesn't do much/anything it's zero cost.