I have an Orinoco/Gold PC card in a laptop that has a kind of dodgy link to my AP: I get 2 yellow bars with the client manager, and the site monitor shows noise is around -95 and signal is about -80 ... so snr is 15. For general web surfing, this is fine; but when using file sharing to get to the household MP3 server, I experience dropouts, etc. Another node that's pretty close to the AP (Apple Airport) is about snr 30-32 and has all green bars and works great. So I'm thinking an external antenna might help out; would it be better to put an external on the AP or on the dodgy node? If I got one of those 5dBi blade antennae, should I expect my snr to go from 15 -> 20? Or does the internal antenna for the card already provide some and thus it's plus 5 but minus N ...? Am I even thinking about this right?
All other things being equal, should I get a 5dBi blade for the node or, say, an 8dBi "smoke detector" for the AP? Is that going to be enough? Thanks, -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
