Forums | MacLife

Drinking, staying out late, drug use, and sex with random people? I can't think of any better indicators than those.

Fellows, I appreciate your efforts at levity, however, they aren't answering his question.

mitstoshi, are you experiencing problems connecting? what are you connecting to? what is your hardware, computer and router, what OS?

Usually if a card goes bad it fails completely. If you are having connection problems it could be due to other factors.

Signal is produced by the router. That's where your problem may be. Also, it might be caused by interference from another device, like a wireless phone or microwave in the vicinity.

One possible solution is to check your antenna on the router. Distance to the router may also affect signal, as would obstacles like walls, floors, etc. You might look at the router setup and change to a different broadcast channel. That might clear up your problem as well.

could be a short in the card's antenna ...


they have an external antenna. It could loose or broken.

While there are 11 channels available for WiFi, in reality there are only 3 useful channels: 1, 6 and 11. There is sufficient bleed-through in WiFi that to choose any of the others in between will cause interference with the other two. Other than this caution there should be no problem with changing channels for WiFi. Once you change your primary base station all your other devices within your network should change automatically.

Yes, you were reading that right.

What you might try is using iStumbler (donationware) which will identify wireless routers in your area and the channels that they are using. It may be such that the WiFi band in your area is already too crowded and that you have to analyze what might be used. For example: you might find that the three useful channels are already occupied, but iStumbler also reports on the relative signal strength of those routers in your area. You may find that the router using, say, channel 1 is weaker than those using channels 6 and 11 and thus channel 1 is the one you can use. It may not be without interference but it should be less so than competing against the stronger signals on the other channels.

mitstoshi wrote:

After I changed to 6, iStumbler showed a new nearby network using channel 6. So I changed again to 8 and now in my neighborhood, there are 3 networks using channel 1 ( the network using 6 has changed to 1).  And that is the way now. I think it is helping my situation. It looks that way. What do you think?

Sorry for taking so long to reply but I was out of town for a long weekend and didn't want to get online.

You might try channel 11 and see if that further improves your situation, but there might be a reason why no one else in your area is using it--perhaps some device is on that channel which makes it unusable for WiFi. The problem with using channel 8 is that if anyone else tries to use channel 6 or 11 then either of these may interfere with yours on 8. It would be best for you to select 6 or 11, leaving the other channel for anyone else to use.

Again, my apologies for taking so long to reply.

Sure, since no one else close to you is using channel 11.

You might note the signal strengths of those local WiFis. It is likely that only one of those using channel 1 is close enough to interfere with yours if you were to use channel 1, and that the others are sufficiently weak because of distance that they do not matter (which would explain why your use of channels 6 and 8 wasn't a problem).