17" Powerbook: spotty airport connectivity

A

apcaruso

Registered
Hi,

We have three macs in the house, a 15" 1GH powerbook with a regular aiport card, a dual 1GH powermac with a regular airport card and a 17" 1.5GH powerbook with and airport extreme card. The 15" powerbook and powermac work fine, but the 17" Powerbook's wireless connectivity is spotty. Being roughly 15' away from the wireless router, I'll have a strong signal strength 90 % of the time (4 out of 4 bars), but roughly every few minutes I'll completely lose signal for 5 - 10 seconds or so. I don't notice this with either of the other macs.

Any ideas on what the problem could be?

Thanks,
Anthony
 
I've had that happen from time to time with an old 802.11b WAP and my PB with AirPort Extreme card. When exchanged that for a 802.11b/g wireless router, the problem went away. I'm not sure what the problem really was, but maybe you could state what your wireless router is (model, make, protocols...) to further delve into the problem?
 
I had somewhat similar problems that had a completely illogical solution (at least illogical to me).

One of the machines on my home network would often disconnect, airport would disappear, others machines unaffected.

After much frustration, I did the following, which is the opposite of some of the standard advice- in the Airport admin utility, I turned OFF interference robustness, set station density to LOW, and switched back to channel 11 (one neighbor, not the strongest, on ch. 9)-worked perfectly for 3 weeks now. I think somehow it was related to interference from neighbors wireless networks which were as stong as my own at the problem machine. One would think all of this would have made my problem worse, but it fixed it.

But this is very easy to do, so it might be worth a test.

Good Luck!
 
Fryke,

My DSL modem is a Westell Versalink, which I think is 802.11g. Not sure what the protocols are; where would I find that information.

Ron,
My nearest neighbor is probably about 750 feet away, so I don't think interference is the problem. Are you using and Apple Airport router?

Thanks for you help.
Anthony
 
Anthony,

Yes, I'm using and Airport-so my settings are in "Airport Admin Utility". I have no idea where the equivalent settings would be for your router but there must be set up software somewhere.....one of your machines must have been used to set up the network in the first place.

With neighbors so far away you are probably right. But you can get some idea by getting the "MacStumber" utility. It will sniff out local networks for you. I was very surprised to find out that neighbor networks were as strong as my own at the location of the problem machine. My other machines that didn't have problems had my own network signal much stronger......

Hope some of this helps!

Good luck!

RonB
 
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