question about wireless strength/antenna/card

I have a dell inspiron laptop with a Truemobile 1150 internal Mini-PCI
card. I'm not really comfortable with playing with hardware, but, I
have opened my laptop and re-seated the antenna connector to the card
when it came off, once, in the distant past.

Lately, I have really weak connections with my laptop. Tonight, I'm
sitting with my laptop, DIRECTLY in front of my WAP. I know it's not
the WAP, because my husband's laptop's connection is "just fine".

Sitting in front of the WAP and looking at my linux wireless tool
display, my Link quality wanders from ~22% to ~29%, my signal strength
sits fairly steady at ~60%, and my "noise level" (is that
interference?) ~45%. I get an 11 mbs connection, but, if I move out of
this room it drops to 6 mbps and if I go downstairs to the first
floor, it becomes 2 mbs (as well as simply dropping in and out
frequently).

Right now, my WAP is about a foot away from me, and my husband's
laptop has excellent reception from anywhere in the house (except a
single dead spot in the kitchen).

My question is, what can I do to troubleshoot what's "wrong" with
this, whether I need a new card, whether there's something wrong with
my antenna or the connector between the card and the antenna, or
"what"?

Gwen

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 03:54:27 -0400, Gwen Morse
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>I have a dell inspiron laptop with a Truemobile 1150 internal Mini-PCI
>card. I'm not really comfortable with playing with hardware, but, I
>have opened my laptop and re-seated the antenna connector to the card
>when it came off, once, in the distant past.
>
>Lately, I have really weak connections with my laptop. Tonight, I'm
>sitting with my laptop, DIRECTLY in front of my WAP. I know it's not
>the WAP, because my husband's laptop's connection is "just fine".
>
>Sitting in front of the WAP and looking at my linux wireless tool
>display, my Link quality wanders from ~22% to ~29%, my signal strength
>sits fairly steady at ~60%, and my "noise level" (is that
>interference?) ~45%.

Yes, it's mostly interference. You can have a high signal strength,
but if there's another radio on the same channel, you'll see some
"noise". Same with cordless phones, microwave ovens, and other
sources of 2.4Ghz crud. The tatio of signal strength to noise level
is called signal to noise ratio or in "link quality".

>I get an 11 mbs connection, but, if I move out of
>this room it drops to 6 mbps and if I go downstairs to the first
>floor, it becomes 2 mbs (as well as simply dropping in and out
>frequently).
>
> Right now, my WAP is about a foot away from me, and my husband's
>laptop has excellent reception from anywhere in the house (except a
>single dead spot in the kitchen).
>
>My question is, what can I do to troubleshoot what's "wrong" with
>this, whether I need a new card, whether there's something wrong with
>my antenna or the connector between the card and the antenna, or
>"what"?

You've already done the most important part of the troubleshooting
exercise. You've determined that it must be either the Dell
Truemobile 1150 card, antenna, or connector. Here are the
installation instructions for the 1150 card from Dell:
http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...up.htm#install
My guess is that it's the antenna connector again. Unplug, blow dry
the dust out of it, plug back in.



--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831.336.2558 voice http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
# (E-Mail Removed)
# 831.421.6491 digital_pager (E-Mail Removed) AE6KS