On Sep 22, 2006, at 11:52 PM, Bill Micou wrote: > Looks like a wet week-end, perfect time to solve my only Mac > problem. I have had an AirPort Extreme for over a year and have > never been happy with the reception.
I'm not using an Airport any more, but I do have one of the older "b" units. (Anyone want to buy it?) Mine was in a first-floor closet right in the middle of the house mounted to the ceiling horizontally. I got a good signal everywhere on the first floor and a decent signal upstairs, but a very much weaker one in the basement. My wife's iBook was usable everywhere in the house, but my PowerBook had numerous weak spots that would go down to one bar. When I upgraded to "g", I bought a Netgear wireless router and put it in the same place. Now, I get a good signal everywhere in the house and even three bars the back yard. The Netgear costs less than half the price of an Airport and works better. > I heard on a podcast that airport channels should be set on 1, 6, or > 11. Both my units are set on channel 10. What channel do users in > this group use? Should I reset both devices to default, and start > over with the airport admin utility? Should both be set to the same > channel? When I first got a wireless router, I checked into this because I thought changing channels might help. All the channels are distributed around 2.45 GHz and their frequencies are close enough together that one shouldn't be much different from another. The one channel I'd stay away from is 6 because that's often the default on a new device--right in the middle--so you're most likely to get interference from the neighbors who don't mess with settings. In fact, we had an old baby monitor that used 6 and couldn't be changed. If you have 2.4 GHz wireless phones, check to see what channels they use and set your router to avoid them. I recently switched to a 5.8 GHz phone system, but my older phones were 2.4 GHz and would search for open channels. The seemed to default to 6, if it was free. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20060923/827569ea/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2452 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20060923/827569ea/attachment.bin -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ The next Louisville Computer Society meeting is September 26. Posting address: MacGroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu Information: http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
