[olePigeon]

So I got a 6dbi antenna for my Linksys hoping to get rid of the pausing in my AirportExpress. Well, it certainly wasn't the 2x as advertised. I have a 2 bar signal in my livingroom before the antenna, and a 2bar signal in my libingroom after the antenna.

The signal was a little better in adjacent rooms, but that was about it. Don't buy a Hawking antenna, that's my advice.

I saw a 19dbi antenna for 30 bucks more. I'm gonna give that at try, but I didn't think I'd need that big of an antenna for my 2 room apartment.

[John Strung]

Does your LinkSys have two antennae or one? If two, you may have to turn off the unused antenna using the base station software.

Google of "wifi external antenna" You will find a wealth of information.

[ghporter]

An omnidirectional antenna with 6db of gain will simply squash the transmitter's radiating pattern (and the receiver's reception pattern) into a flatened disk. Sometimes you get better performance because there's less signal going up and thus more of it going outward. Sometimes there are other factors involved.

I've had very good results from simply elevating my access point to about 6' above the floor. Also, as John mentioned, since your Linksys box most likely has two antennas, you need to go into its configuration and tell it to use ONLY the antenna port with the fancy Hawking antenna on it. By default it will be set in "Diversity" mode, which needs both antennas to work properly. Diversity improves performance in situations where there are interfering and/or multipath signals, but you seem to need something better than that. I don't know if the "left" and "right" antenna are figured when you're facing the box, or from behind; if setting it to one doesn't change anything, set it to the other one.

[John Strung]

Incidentally, I added a 4 dB non-directional DLink antenna to my Dlink 604 (which has only one antenna), and it did make a noticeable difference in signal strength. I also noticed that the signal was very sensitive to antenna position. Moving the antenna a few inches in one direction or another could make a substantial difference in signal strength (probably because of the location of metal ducts, etc inside walls and ceilings.)

Having said that, it should be noted that the DLink never had as good range as my previous SMC7004AWBR, which had two antennae.

With a directional antenna, the direction the antenna is pointed in will obviously be crucial.

[olePigeon]

How do I disable an antenna? I don't see any options. I'm using a Linksys WRT54GS v1.1.

[ghporter]

That's very weird-antenna selection on my WAP54G is in the Advanced Wireless section, but there's no mention of it whatsoever in the WRT54GS manual... Not promising. I'm looking into this, but don't let that stop anyone else who might have a good idea.

[John Strung]

Can you attach the directional antenna to the Airport Express and point it back at the LinkSys instead of the other way round?

[ghporter]

The best I can find about selecting one or the other antenna on a WRT54GS is that Linksys' firmware doesn't do it. Fortunately there are other, good quality firmwares that will.

For example, here's Sveasoft's free firmware for the WRT54GS. The only glitch is that the selection option is under "Transmit Power" in the Advanced Wireless options page.

Yes, you can upload this firmware using a Mac; the Linksys firmware lets you do this from inside the configuration pages. And Sveasoft's product is "enhanced" from Linksys', not a wholly new package, so it will have just about all of the functions Linksys gave it, plus a lot more.

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by John Strung:
Can you attach the directional antenna to the Airport Express and point it back at the LinkSys instead of the other way round?

There's no antenna connector for the Airport Express, unfortunately. Apparently, not even an internal one that you can hack up.

Every time I tried using the Sveasoft firmware, the flash would fail. So I ended up installing HyperWRT firmware on my Linksys (which worked!) and set both the RX and TX antenna selector to the left antenna (I don't know what RX and TX are,) then connected the Hawking. I get 75% to 100% signal now in the living room, and, depending on where I am in the kitchen, I'll get up to 75% signal. So there was an improvement, but not 2x as claimed. More like 1.5x. But an improvement, none the less.

I also discovered the Signal Beacon interval. On Linksys' website it mentions disconnections and pauses in network performance on WindowsXP could be because the beacon isn't modulating fast enough, so Windows will time-out from the network. I increased the speed from 100 ms to 50 ms interval.

Anyway, to make a long story short, my AirPort Express has been working for 3 days now without any pauses, jumps, skips, or anything, even while I'm transferring files over the network.

Now I'm curious if it's just the beacon interval that I needed to change and if I can disconnect the antenna.

I'll fiddle around with it.

My next project is to get WDS working on the HyperWRT firmware so I can connect directly to the Airport Express and get a 100% signal in the Kitchen.

[olePigeon]

As an afterthought, I think I might write up a tutorial from my experience. I'm sure there're a lot of Linksys/Airport Express users out there that've had the same problems I have (in fact, I KNOW there are. I searched so many forums looking for solutions.)

And a side note, this just popped up. Is it not possible to conjugate "that" and "have" and make "that've?" My spell checker went psycho on that word.

[ghporter]

RX and TX are shorthand for receive and transmit. I don't know why you should have had problems flashing the Sveasoft firmware, but HyperWRT also has a good reputation, and since it works, you should do fine.

One school of thought in dealing with dual-antenna systems is to use corner reflectors on the existing antennas to localize the coverage (and incidentally improve the signal level in the coverage area). There are some pretty simple ways to do this with basic home hobby tools and materials, but some of the results look, well, dorky. Not that they aren't effective, mind you, they just don't look very professional. Check out this page for one of the odder looking results. This one is a bit better.