just an asterisk

Does your wireless ever drive you nuts?  Having trouble understanding why you get perfect signal in the kitchen but not in the bedroom?  I often promise that knowing a few geeky tricks will make your life easier.  In this case, I’ll prove it to you.  We’ll perform a few geeky moves and make your wireless woes disappear (or at lest help you understand them).

Step 1: Gather your supplies

It’s probably not a surprise that you’re going to need to do a little legwork.  Your wireless network is putting itself out there.  Buy it dinner and get to know it.  Here are the tools you’ll need:

1. A pen and paper.  Fancy pants McGee might not be impressed, but you’re not reconfiguring a satellite here.
2. An approximate diagram (not a Picasso) of your apartment/house by floor. I say by floor because most people don’t draw well in 2 dimensions, let alone 3… Here is mine (ignore the numbers for now):
   
3. Finally, you’ll need something to measure wireless signal.  My favorite option is an Ipod Touch, but you could use a laptop.  These measurements will be as precise as your instruments, so if you’re basing everything on the little icon, be flexible…  If you have an iPod Touch, check out the app WiFiFoFum.  You can use the RSSI value for data.

Step 2: Metric comes from the Greek for measure (metron) – soooo what you waiting for?

Once you have your supplies, take a walk around your abode and measure the results.  I would try to get two measurements per room. Find a spot, turn your laptop/iPod in the direction of your router (keeping your body out of the way) and wait for about 20-30 seconds.  Then write down what you get.  If you’re just using a laptop, the reading might be 1 bar, 2 bars, 3 bars etc.  If you’re using WiFiFoFum or something more fancy, you might get an RSSI reading like –50 or –11.  These readings are better when they’re closer to 0.

As you walk around writing down your measurements, be as thorough as possible.  You don’t need 1000 values, but then again, 5 is probably not all that useful.  I have the advantage of living in a tiny NYC apartment, but I still took 16 readings.  It didn’t take long and it was helpful in the next step.

When you’re done, you could just move on to the next step OR you can take a geeky detour and put it into excel (with another drawing of your home).  Excel has a sexy conditional formatting feature that will provide lovely depth to the image (my best signal is green, my worst is red).  This does not help with anything… at all.  It just looks nice.

Step 3:  Adapt!

Your goal was to improve your wireless in your home.  You now have a map of where wireless is good, and where it’s not.  I think it’s most likely that your home falls into 1 of 2 categories:

1. You have pretty good coverage with a few dead zones or low signal areas.

2. You have dead zones all over the place.

Let’s start with situation one.  If you (like me) just have a few areas farthest from your router with low signal, the first step should be to try adjusting your equipment.  Here is an example, just to show you how powerful this can be.  I am sitting in the same room as my wireless router.  I get “excellent” signal.  Using a roll of tin foil, I encased my router in layers, one at a time, and measured the change.  Here are the results:

As you can see from the graph, my signal was effectively cut in half just by adding a layer of tin foil… 1 layer!  Now think about what is probably in your wall.  Anything metal will have a similar effect.  Therefore, the first step to WIFI nirvana is to minimize the metal between the point you want to improve and your router.

Remember that this works both ways.  Metal reflects signal, but you can use this to your advantage.  For example, if you could use superman x-ray vision and see from my router to the computer in the kitchen, you would pass through two layers of bathroom tile, a tub, and a ton of metal pipes.  It’s no surprise that the signal, when it reaches its destination is … crappy.  However, this doesn’t mean I’m out of luck.  I built this rather silly looking parabolic antenna out of my lucky roll of tin foil and some tape.  I put it on the far side of my computer and suddenly “no signal” became “very weak”.  I can work with that, problem solved.

The above technique can be thought of as reducing interference or maximizing signal.  However, if you have dead zones all over your home, the situation becomes a bit more complicated.  You can’t just move stuff around or create reflective surfaces.  WiFi typically has a range of about 100 feet, a value that is seriously diminished when you add barriers.  If you want to cover more than an apartment sized space, consider these options:

• A repeater is a device that allows you to grab a weak signal and give it a boost, passing it even further than it’s normal range.  If I’m standing one room shouting “JAA rocks”, my wife might (but probably wouldn’t) act as a repeater, yelling JAA rocks so the neighbors can hear the good news.  These are affordable and available online from many retailers.
• Another option, if you have two connections to the internet, would be to install another router.  You would then have wireless network A and wireless network B (or if you are really slick you could try to make wireless network A extend across both routers).  This approach is not for the faint of heart – you’ll need to do some research.

Whichever option you chose, the solution will involve increasing the size of your network with hardware.  Maybe one day we’ll try to cover it here, but in the meantime, if you are embarking on a project, shoot me an email at ab@justanasterisk.com if you have any questions.

Good luck making your network into a kingdom.  While you’re at it don’t forget to put in some security!!!  There’s no reason to share your hard work with freeloaders.  I’ll write about that soon.

~ab

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Educational. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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