poor 802.11b range

I've finally got my home network going. It's a conglomeration of cast off
equipment and one new Belkin USB wireless NIC.

I have an SMC 2652W access point, a D-Link 520 PCI card (I think - it's
the newer one with the 8211 chipset), and the Belkin USB NIC.

All of this works quite well. After the horror stories I read about USB
performance, I was surprised - the Belkin sustains a throughput in excess
of 400KB/sec, not bad.

My problem is the D-Link 520. It has a very limited range - less than 30'
in a real house environment, going through walls. This is pretty poor....

Any way to improve this? The antenna on the D-Link is a piece of junk, a
tinything about the size of a cigarette. I notice that some of the other
PCI cards have much larger antennas.

Any suggestions?

-Dondo

"Captain Dondo" <captain@thebigsandbox.com> wrote in message news:<pan.2003.07.04.21.15.18.507002@thebigsandbox .com>...
> I've finally got my home network going. It's a conglomeration of cast off
> equipment and one new Belkin USB wireless NIC.

sorry, I cannot help, but could you tell us what linux driver you are
using on the belkin usb 802.11b adapter?

/iaw

On Fri, 04 Jul 2003 17:31:47 -0400,
Captain Dondo (captain@thebigsandbox.com) wrote:
> My problem is the D-Link 520. It has a very limited range - less than 30'
> in a real house environment, going through walls. This is pretty poor....
>
> Any way to improve this? The antenna on the D-Link is a piece of junk, a
> tinything about the size of a cigarette. I notice that some of the other
> PCI cards have much larger antennas.
>
> Any suggestions?

Two suggestions -- first, can you reposition your PC so that the antenna
of the DWL-520 is not oriented toward any metal surfaces? In my
experience, this greatly limits range of wireless cards. Second, you're
lucky -- the antenna on the DWL-520 is detachable. D-link sells larger
antennas that can be connected to the 520. You could always consider
replacing the antenna if repositioning doesn't work.

Bev

--
Bev A. Kupf
Bev's House of Pancakes