[TriLUG] linksys wrtg54g range problems

[Jon Carnes]

We have also found that turning up the power on these babies helps them
alot - of course you still need to check for the usual culprits first: 
 - wireless phones in the house
 - Neighbors stomping on your signal
 - Cthulhu infested walls, etc

You don't need to load the latest firmware - or a rogue firmware to do
this. There is a published hack that lets you do it from the current
firware - see the TriLUG presentation from a few months back.

Jon Carnes
(running firmware 3.17 and loving it!)

On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 01:53, Pat Regan wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Nov 2004, Ralph Blach wrote:
> 
> > I have a linksys wrtg54g wireless access point and it seem to have range
> > wireless range problems.  Is this normal
> > for the linksys wireless access points.  The two cards I have are
> > wireless b cards, do  I definately dont need
> > G but better range would be nice.
> >
> > Any sugestions?
> >
> 
> It probably really depends on what the problem is.  Out of the box my
> WRT54G can reach (almost)everywhere in the house at full speed.  This is
> in an old home, and the room the router is in has very old plaster walls
> (the kind with the thin, tightly spaced, wood slats behind the plaster).
> 
> One room in the house is behind a curved plaster wall with a
> chicken-wire-type mesh holding the shape of the plaster.  In that room I
> get a minimal but steady signal.  Turning up the power on the transmitter
> fixed that problem.
> 
> If you want to turn up the transmitter power, you will have to upgrade to
> an aftermarket firmware.  I am running one of the newer Sveasoft
> firmwares.  I can't find the exact page I downloaded from, but this looks
> like a good place to start:
> 
> http://www.neuromancer.ca/wrt54g/
> 
> My rouer claims to be version:
> 
> Alchemy-pre5.3 v2.04.4.8sv
> 
> I have been running this firmware for 2-3 months on 3 routers with no
> issues.
> 
> Among the many things you can do with this firmware is turning up the
> transmitter power.  I believe stock is 28mw...  The firmware I am running
> claims I can turn it up to 251mw, but I believe the ceiling is actually 92
> or so.  I have 2 of my routers running 56mw without any problems.  I have
> read of other people having heat issues at higher settings, YMMV.
> 
> The things that most impressed me about this firmware was the support for
> the layer 7 packet filter for QOS, and that you can configure VLANs
> (although I don't think you can do much useful with VLANs on a 4 port
> switch, the ethernet chip seems to support hardware VLANing).
> 
> As someone else mentioned, you should also check if you are overlapping
> with someone else's channel.  That really kills performance.  Use either
> channel 1, 6, or 11.
> 
> Noise from 2.4ghz chordless phones and whatnot hurts...  My 3 routers are
> in very noise free environments, and I get 500-600k/sec average throughput
> over FTP.  In my old apartment complex I was lucky to break 250k/sec on
> any channel.  There were 3 access points within range of me, none of which
> were on an overlapping channel with me.
> 
> Placement of your hardware helps quite a bit, too.  Going straight through
> a wall is much better than trying to go through at a steep angle...  Every
> wall you hit will soak off a bit of signal...
> 
> How much range are you getting?  And how many walls are you going through?
> 
> Pat