Wireless repeating with DWL-900AP+ - some comments

I have just bought a 900AP+ to go with a DWL-614+ and I thought I
would post some comments on my experience with setting it up as a
repeater. Firstly, I flashed the 900AP+ to firmware 3.06 before I
started. This didn't work - when switched to repeater or client mode,
the 900AP+ made the 614+ wireless network disappear completely. It
would not see any networks at all via the "site survey" button. I
downgraded to 3.05 and this broken behaviour disappeared.

My signal strength from the 614+ was about 50% to my laptop (the 614+
is two floors down in an old house). With the repeater, the signal
strength is around 100%. I was very pleased with this until I started
to do some tests. The repeated signal, even though twice as strong,
gets about 50% less throughput that the original signal. I believe
that this is normal for wireless repeating. This actually makes
downloading anything painfully slow and web browsing is annoyingly
slow too (it's a standard 512 Kb/s DSL link). With the original 614+
signal at 50% strength, I can get up to 70Kb/s and generally 40-50
Kb/s without trouble. With the repeated, stronger signal, I get about
20 Kb/s if I'm lucky.

Another fact, not too well documented by D-Link, is that you cannot
use 4X mode on the 900AP+ when it's repeating. This also means that
you have to disable 4X mode on all of your other wireless bits and
pieces or things get very slow (I had trouble with this). So, you have
to disable 4X on the 614+ too (and your wireless card). This is hardly
a problem because you're never going to need 4X for a 512Kb/s DSL
connection anyway (top speed is about .5 Mb/s ...) but it's very
important to realise this because as D-Link say - if you have any
non-4X hardware on your wireless network, you have to disable 4X on
the rest of it otherwise you'll see performance problems. In my
experience, these performance problems are very significant.

If anyone else has had similar experiences with pretty poor wireless
repeating throughput, I'd be interested in hearing it. It seems that
is makes a lot more sense to use the 900AP+ as a wirless client and
then connect to it via ethernet - that way, you don't get such a huge
throughput loss.