Chat

7458 readers

11 users here now

Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

AskBeehaw

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Would a good antenna fix my wifi? (beehaw.org)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It's a story as old as time. I moved into a new place with great fiber internet - but the modem is in the garage, my desktop PC is not, and the place is a rental so I have limited options for making modifications. The signal is not bad, but I'm getting dropouts.

Since the PC and router are fixed in place I thought maybe a directional antenna or two would help? 5GHz directional antennae are kinda scarce which makes me wonder if I'm on the wrong track. Does this new "beamforming" thing supersede directional antennae?

I have 802.11ax (a.k.a. Wi-Fi 6) on both sides of the connection. Maybe I could upgrade to Wi-Fi 6E and give 6GHz a go? Maybe that would be worse due to the intervening wall...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You make a good point about 2.4GHz; that would probably be more reliable, but slower. It's kinda disappointing to have a gigabit connection, but lose 70% of the speed at the last-meter connection. But 5GHz also loses most of the upstream speed.

Maybe rolling up my sleeves and putting in a cable is the way to go. I have a thought about going into the furnace closet, snuggling the cable alongside the insulation of a duct into the crawlspace, and coming up out the wall through a modified electrical outlet plate. I might be able to pull it off.

Thanks for the ideas!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Cable is always the best option for speed, thought it is a bit of a pain in the arse to set up.

The problem with things like power line extensions and wifi extenders is that you have no guarantee it will solve the problem as you may have a huge amount of noise in the power-lines that kills transmission bandwidth.

There are signal strength apps available that allow you to map the dead spots and try and fix the penetration issue.

A simple test is a steel wok, use it to focus the signal towards the pc (this will block the signal in the other direction) this will give you the highest penetration with the standard setup and it may solve the problem.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You're taking me back to the days when cantennas were popular.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Test

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Pass?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Unfortunately, no. My lemmy client wasn't able to comment due to my profile having multiple languages set. And also, I can't view any of these comments on my profile.

Edit: I set my profile back to have both undetermined and English, and now I can see these comments, but now I can't comment via voyager again.