Shorten the wireless range?

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hyperwifi
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Joined: 17 Jan 2008
Posts: 2

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 18:59    Post subject: Shorten the wireless range? Reply with quote
I have tried searching for answers on most of the following questions for the last few days without much success so please be gentle if they have been answered before and I just wasn't phrasing my searches properly.

My wife works as a software designer and her boss lets her work remotely for the winters so we spend this time in our motor home in Florida. Most campgrounds have WiFi available but its usually very unreliable so we get cable internet and I set up a WRT54GL V1.1 with DD-WRT V23 SP2 STD. My problem is finding a clean channel to use. Like the campground we are in now, channels 1,6 and 11 are used by the campgrounds WiFi, since they are directional antennas only 1 of them has a strong enough signal to use but I can still see the other 2 with Net Stumbler and the other problem is that I am not the only one setting up my own router so I end up with 2 or 3 other channels used in the campground as well. Since nether of us would ever be more than say 50 feet away from the router, can I change some of the settings so that instead of having 100m range my
router only has a range of 15m or 20m. Would this allow me to use a channel near a weaker channel without me getting 10's of thousands Rx and/or Tx errors?

I don't know if this makes any sense or not.

Since I don't know a lot about routers, can someone tell me or point me to a good article on what the numbers mean for SNR, Signal, etc? I use Net Stumbler to see what channels are in use then I just try the other channels in the router until I find the one with the least amount of conflicts. So it would be nice to have a better understanding of what the numbers are trying to tell me.

Also, Is there a problem if we are only getting a signal strength (under Wireless Status) of 55% and we are only 10 to 12 feet away from the router with nothing between it and us?

Thanks
Robby
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007consulting
DD-WRT User


Joined: 07 Nov 2007
Posts: 286

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 19:10    Post subject: Reply with quote
I'm in a really congested area, and find channel 1 to be the best, regardless of how many people there are. Your results may be different. In the advanced Wireless Settings, what is your xmit power set at? Have you tried lowering the beacon interval?
hyperwifi
DD-WRT Novice


Joined: 17 Jan 2008
Posts: 2

PostPosted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 23:51    Post subject: Reply with quote
Currently my xmit is still at the default of 28 and I have lowered the beacon interval to 75 but I still have almost 200,000 Rx errors versus 30 Tx errors over just 2 1/2 days.
Picchioni
DD-WRT User


Joined: 20 Sep 2006
Posts: 120

PostPosted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 0:22    Post subject: Reply with quote
You might try decreasing the xmit power, or use one of the European or Japanese wireless channels. Chances are you'll need to install the wireless driver from that region to unlock the extra channels.
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