WEP - HEX vs ASCII

I have 256 bit WEP enabled. When I choose HEX, it's 58 digits,
restricted to 0-9, A-F, or a-f. ASCII has a key length of 29, but the
characters are unrestricted. I thought HEX was supposed to allow more
characters, and be more secure - ?

Jeff C wrote:
> HEX by definition can only be characters 0-F (hexadecimal = base 16).
> Now to actually compare the two formats you have to realize that hex
> uses two digits to each one digit of ASCII (or somewhat vice-versa).
> Each ASCII character occupies one byte, each HEX character occupies
> one half byte (= 4 bits). There are 16 unique bit patterns in 4 bits
> = HEX. Since it takes two HEX digits to make up a byte we can
> represent 256 unique bit patterns using two HEX digits.
>
> Now for the adventure into my weaker knowledge area...
>
> ASCII contains alpha-numeric characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9, )-(, and a
> handful (large?) of other printable characters. At a guess this

True - how could you enter characters such as TAB or Carriage return or
SPACE - using HEX you can enter these.

> could total about 164 characters. So between the two we have a
> larger number of choices available when using HEX.
>
> Good Luck,
> -Jeff C
>
> "Steve" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>> I have 256 bit WEP enabled. When I choose HEX, it's 58 digits,
>> restricted to 0-9, A-F, or a-f. ASCII has a key length of 29, but
>> the characters are unrestricted. I thought HEX was supposed to
>> allow more characters, and be more secure - ?