Anything wrong with this?

[matttheniceguy]

I live in a student housing complex at university, that is pretty much the same as a condo. It's a 3 story wood framed building, built on the ultra cheap (leaky condo all the way). An 802.11g wireless network was installed through the place and this is what we are sudposed to use for internet. The problem is that they are cheap and didn't install enough equipment to get a good signal everywhere.

The signal on my linksys pci card ranged from 1-2 bars in good weather, and 1-disconnected when it rained, which is 90% of the time here in the winter. The problem seemed to be that there was almost no signal where my computer was, and I couldn't move it. To to fix this, I took a ~6' piece of coaxial cable, connected it to the antenna that is sudposed to go on the card (this involved a lot of electrical tape) and then soldered the coax to the pins sticking though the pcb of the card. With the antenna relocated, my signal now ranges from 4-5 bars

What I want to know is, am I going to kill my card or something? I'm not all that familiar with wireless networking equipment. I can't see anything wrong with this extention cable, but I really don't know.

-edit-

OK, I was testing it out and noticed something pretty strange. When there is pretty much no internet traffic (like mesenger only) the signal is at 4-5 bars, but when I load the connection, the signal drops way down to 1-2 bars. The connection stays connected at full speed, and everything seems to work fine, but whenever there is any traffic the signal drops way down.

On Cnet's bandwidth test I get a speed of ~3350 kbps, and everything is working nicely, I'm just a little worried about my signal droping so much, like the card can't handle the resistance of the cable or something.

 

[su root]

You should be fine. As long as the the antenna/cable isnt' shorting out anywhere, you'll be fine.

The signal issue could be any number of things, but it's probably just the software being quirky. Download a copy of netstumbler www.netstumber.com fire it up, select your AP and it should give you a graph with the signal strength.. try loading down the line and see if it drops in there.

 

[ErikD]

I would think the biggest problem would be soldering the coax to the PCB, as if your not careful the heat could damge the other pieces on the PCB. BUT, as you have already done this with no problems,

 

[DocGiggs]

or you can go to radio shack and buy a real antenna and solder that inplace. Another thing would be to get an access point to extend the reach. Last but not least, you could buy a really long cat5 cable and screw the wireless solution.

 

[matttheniceguy]

I wish I could get a big old CAT5, but there is no wired network here at all. My university, UBC, has installed a wireless network though where I live (and vitrually everywhere else on campus)

My network card is quite literally a laptop card that has been solderd to a little pcb to install in a pci slot, so soldering it was pretty simple.

I'll try the netstumbler thing, thanks for the link. I figured I should try something a little better than the windows "bar test"

-edit-

Like usual, it turns out windows was just smoking something with it's signal strength meter. NetStumbler says I have a constant signal of a little worse than -60 db, and the strehgth doesn't change in the least when I cause a lot of traffic. Thanks for the help guys, I feel a lot better knowing my signal is actually constant and I'm not putting too much load on the card or something.