# Airport flakey-disconnects/intermittent ?solution?



## RonB (Jan 15, 2006)

Hi Everyone,

I've had a maddening problem with my airport connection that became intolerable over the last couple of weeks. 

Airport would disconnect and reconnect multiple times a minute, lose the connection entirely, lose the network entirely, and otherwise drive me crazy.  Especially if I were downloading a big file.  Indicated signal strength would go from very strong to zero.......  

I spent hours reading various forum posts on this topic (with many disconnects to amuse me).  Clearly this sort of behavior is not unusual. and many threads died without resolution.  

Following various suggestions found on the forum I did the following things trying to fix.  

In the Airport admin utility, I increased station density (3 neighbors have wireless), turned on interference robustness, changed channels to be as far way from the other stations' channels (determined w/ MacStumbler, a great little utility).  Everything I did made it worse!  Not what was expected.

I also removed the two cordless phones I have in the room.  The microwave is far away........  

So, in a fit of frustration, I turned OFF interference robustness, set station density to LOW, and switched back to channel 11 (a neighbor is on 9).  Logically, one would expect all of this to make my situation worse?   

So, bizarrely, it has now worked perfectly for nearly an hour.     

Go figure.  But, if you are having Airport problems you might just try this.

Can any airport guru out there explain this??

Other data:  3 other computers on the same network were seldom affected by this behavior but they are a little closer to the base station...signal strength shows good on all.  Problem machine is Mac G4, OS 10.3.9,  all latest airport updates installed. Airport base station is the "snow" saucer.  One other identical machine in house, 2 G4 laptops, all on 10.3.9....all machines happily networking now!

I hope this helps some frustrated person out there!!   

Cheers!

RonB

PS-


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## RonB (Feb 4, 2006)

This is a follow up to my airport flakey/disconnect problem with only one computer in my home network.

Making the seemingly illogical changes to the airport settings mentioned in my previous post, the network has worked perfectly for the last 3 weeks on the problem machine.

In further analysis, it seems that the affected computer is in a place where my neighbors wireless networks are as strong as mine (MacStumbler will snoop this out for you-freeware).  This is a guess-any comments from Gurus out there??  

In anycase, the procedure outlined below worked well in my case-others might try it if they are having airport disconnects on only machine in their networks.  

Details below from my earlier post-Good luck!  

Ron

THE LOGICAL SOLUTION THAT DOESN'T WORK:  In the Airport admin utility, I increased station density (3 neighbors have wireless), turned on interference robustness, changed channels to be as far way from the other stations' channels (determined w/ MacStumbler, a great little utility). Everything I did made it worse! Not what was expected.

THE FIX:  So, in a fit of frustration, in the Airport admin utility, I turned OFF interference robustness, set station density to LOW, and switched back to channel 11 (a neighbor is on 9). Logically, one would expect all of this to make my situation worse?  THREE WEEKS NOW, working perfectly?!


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