Re: Why is my signal less that 50% when I'm in same room as router but 100% in the garden

"fluffychick" <fluffychick.2wnamu@no-mx.wirelessforums.org> wrote in message
> I can't figure it out. My router is in the living room away from
> cordless phones and microwaves etc. When I'm sat 2 metres away from it
> on the sofa I have a signal of 47%. When I go in the back garden, and
> the signal has to pass through the hall, dining room, kitchen and
> bathroom, it's 95 or even 100%.

If your just using the windows wireless zero config utility to measure
signal strength I would try something else. After doing some test of
different routers in my own home I found that in a test setup I had which
included my router/ap and a test router/ap that had a different ssid than my
regular router.
Using netstumbler showed that the test router was about 10-15 db higher
above the noise level than my normal router however viewing it with the WZC
it showed my my main router as having four bars and my test router only
having one, even though it was clearly stronger.
What I noticed was that because my main router was in my preferred network
list windows chose to make it look better to be than a network that was not
in my list. (i was not connected and both routers were on different channels
that had no other networks on them)

I removed my network from the preferred list and windows showed my main
router as a 1 and my test router as a 2 or 3.

Anyway, said all of that to say this.. Don't trust windows and maybe even a
third part app that came with your laptop/wireless card.

Adair