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Where's my Wi-Fi?
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Junior Member
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Status:
Offline
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Actually, it's still there but suddenly I can't connect! All suggestions appreciated. Here are the details:
I have an airport-equipped G3 laptop (Pismo) and original airport base station at home. Normally I can connect from anywhere in the house with 2-3 bars signal strength. But the last few days I cannot connect unless within a few feet. Then I get 4 bars. I can also move to the next room and still stay connected, even though I couldn't make the initial connect after waking the powerbook up in that room. On the other hand, my wife's Dell laptop can still connect from anywhere in the house with good signal strength. This makes it seem like a problem with my laptop.
But today I took the laptop to work and had no problem connecting to my usual Linksys base station located 2 floors away in a steel and concrete building with 2-3 bars of signal strength, as usual. So it would seem that the laptop is OK. So where is the problem?
I checked the base station configuration at home. It seemed to be exactly as expected. The network is closed, encryption is on and login is restricted to the MAC addresses of the two laptops. Base station density is set to low. I tried changing channels and lowering the minimum connect rate to 1 MHz from 2, but this made no difference.
What gives? 
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Admin Emeritus  Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Status:
Offline
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Sounds like maybe the antenna has come loose. Pop up the keyboard, and make sure the antenna plug on the Airport card is entirely plugged in.
tooki
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Junior Member
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Status:
Offline
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Tooki, Thanks for the suggestion. I popped the keyboard. Everything looked OK but I unplugged and reinstalled both the airport card and the antenna connector. Didn't help.
But here's some new info: If I wake up the machine at a distance from the base station, it doesn't detect the base station (0 bars). I can walk it right up to the base station and still no bars. If I then put it to sleep, on waking it detects the base station and gets 4 bars. If I walk it some distance away, it may say 3 bars but in fact it isn't connected - no internet and in fact it has a self-assigned IP. What do you think?
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Administrator  Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status:
Offline
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In a lot of cases (maybe the vast majority), re-seating your card and its antenna cable fixes poor AirPort connection problems. Since you've done that, the problem needs to be reviewed.
Connecting after sleep is a common problem. I usually suggest that you either disconnect before putting the computer to sleep, or manually reconnect after waking it up. There are a number of factors involved in the problem, but it basically boils down to the card not knowing the computer is going to sleep, so it thinks it's still in the same state it was-and it thinks its key is still valid. The disconnect/reconnect cycle tells the card to start again, find the access point, get a new key, and synchronize with the network. While it would be nice for Apple to build the AirPort firmware so that the card knew about sleep (HINT, HINT!), this workaround seems to get the job done with a minimum of fuss.
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Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
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