Opening Up the Hood
Sometimes poking around can boost your wireless coverage area immensely.
As a seller of various wireless networking equipment, we are infatuated with trying to find new ways for our customers (and ourselves) to get better and stronger wireless coverage. If you have hundreds of dollars to spend, it is not hard to do- just by the top of line equipment. But if you don't have that much money, or don't want to spend that much, it is still possible to build a quality wireless network on a tight budget. In fact you may be able to build an enterprise class network using the low or midrange equipment you already have with just a single addon.
That's what I found out when I was faced with a wireless coverage issue here at Rokland this week. We test out all of our used wireless cards here at the office to make sure they work properly before we ship them to customers. We used to have the testing laptop right next to our Proxim access point. It did the job, but then we decided to move the access point further away so that we could also test the range on some of these cards and include this information in our item descriptions. That also worked well. But because the access point is now on the far side of the office, some of our desktop PCs on the other side of the building that have low range PCI cards in them could no longer connect to the access point. The simple solution was to buy a new access point for the weak coverage areas.
But before spending the money on that, I decided to poke inside our Proxim access point just to see how it worked. Inside was a Proxim PCMCIA card attached to the main board of the access point. The PCMCIA card is not a standard one that Proxim manufactures for use in laptops, it was a special one that had no attached antenna, but instead had two connectors in which the access point antenna was connected. They looked like MMCX connectors. I removed the OEM antenna (which is low gain) and sure enough, I had two MMCX connectors. So I then connected a 5 dBi gain magnetic mount antenna (as seen here) to the PCMCIA card and put the casing back on the access point. The antenna cable neatly comes out of the hole where the OEM Proxim antenna used to come out. I powered up the access point and now get brilliant coverage (the same as I would with an enterprise class access point with a similar gain antenna). All those PCs with low range PCI cards at the far end of the office that could not get a signal before now all get "excellent" signals ("excellent" is not an adjective I am applying, that is the quality of the signal as described by the Windows XP wireless utility). So instead of buying a new access point or buying high gain RP-SMA antennae for all of the PCs on the far side of the office, I was able to accomplish my needs with the addition of just one magnetic mount antenna to our wireless network.
For all I know, many access points may not have an internal interface like our Proxim one and therefore the antenna may not be upgradeable. But it never hurts to poke around (well, almost never, but don't blame me if you do and you break something) you might just be able to save yourself some money.
posted at: 12:29 | path: | permanent link to this entry