>From my early days as a Radio Amateur some 44 years ago 2.4Ghz radio was highly experimental and strictly line of site. Today it is regarded as everyday but it still doesn't travel well. There are some materials that it will not penetrate well including some brick and breeze block.
I have very intermittant problems with Wi-Fi even using a Netgear router and a laptop. Some days it's very good, other days it's just not reliable. In my opinion it can be totally down to your own environment. Does it have to travel through brick, breeze or just plasteboard. The radio wave tend to scatter when it hits a surface it can't penetrate and will therefore try an alternative route, perhaps through the door, or perhaps through the ceiling until it is bounced down again. Water moisture in the air is likely to change the transmission conditions therefore you can expect the weather to have an effect. My house was built in the 1920's and many of the internal Walls are solid. The type of brick used soaks up water like a sponge and it has taken me nearly 20 years to get this house totally dry. I have neighbours who also you Wi-Fi and it is certainly down to the local weather conditions as to whether I can see their networks and therefore whether they have the potential to interfere. If they are not advertising their SSID which is quite a wise thing to do then you cannot see them and will not know if they are interfering. Some of these problems may be reduced by increased use of the 5Ghz band as this frequency appears to scatter a little more reliably but time will tell and Squeezebox doesn't support this yet. As far as I can tell the Squeezebox is no more reliable or unreliable in my setup as my laptop, in fact I cannot see how it is fair to expect it to magically work, there may be some compatibitiy issues with some other devices but it appears to me that Slim Devices is bending over backwards to try to clear any of these issues at the moment. Slim Server is open source software that is under constant development which means it is always going to be liable to bugs. Serious bugs should be confined to the development version but some minor bugs will remain in the stable version because it is known that these bugs will disappear when the stable version moves on. I have been running Slim Server on WindowsXP over the past year and I reckon this is one of the most stable pieces of open source software I have run for some time and I have been in the IT industry for a good many years. If you want usability and good audio quality then in my opinion there isn't another product out there to come near to Slim Server and Squeezebox. If you are having troubles try eliminating wireless by using a direct connection for a test and do it at a time that you have having problems with the wireless connection. If this is better then don't use Wi-Fi, it is unlikely to be reliable for you whatever product you are using. Look for an alternative. Personally I find the Ethernet over Mains works well in my situation. This has it's own problems, where to plug in the units, it will not work through mains filters and heavy machinery can interfere so you might have problems if you have air conditioning. The final choice is with you, move on to another product if you are convinced to call it a day, it is probably only the audio quality and your bank balance that will suffer. -- MrStan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MrStan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1771 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=16523 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
