Orientation for 66u in OLD house with thick walls!

[ibandreas]

Hi,
I just bought a 66u and I wish I could get a bit more range out of it. My house is not huge but it's an old European house with mega thick walls of combined brick and wood. My range (strangely) is great from the room with router to the room directly beneath (indicating to me that the walls are thicker than the floors) but the range from one room to another in abysmal. I drew an ethernet cable to the floor below (prior to wifi testing and prior to moving in ) and I have an old WNDR3700v1 on the lower floor as an access point. I though this would give me perfect wifi throughout the house but alas, I have practically no signal in any rooms except the two with the routers.
please tell me someone has a silver bullet solution to this! Am I orienting them wrong? The upstairs 66u with stock firmware is on a table flat with antanea oriented in 45, 90 45 pattern. The downstairs wndr3700v1 is hanging vertical. I flashed it to ddwrt to see if I gained something but went back to stock after I saw diminishing results.
I will do or pay almost anything to have a somewhat hidden but thorough wifi signal in my house and yard.
Thanks for your advice SNB!

 

[KGB7]

There is no silver bullet with WiFi. You'll just have to keep testing various antenna positions and router orientation till it works in your house.

You try older Merlin's firmware that uses older sdk5 driver for better range.

 

[dlandiss]

Hi, I just bought a 66u and I wish I could get a bit more range out of it.

Your antenna configuration is OK. The fan shape that it creates should be broadside to the direction that needs more range.

I'm sure you already know that 2.4GHz has much better range and wall-penetrating ability than 5GHz. Stick to 20MHz channel width.

Search a few more messages here for advice about which Merlin package to install. Evidently some of the earlier versions (sdk5??) have better range.

Experiment also with the location and orientation of the client computers. I can see as much as 10dB difference just by moving a laptop a few inches. Can you use an external adapter like the USB-N66? With my laptop sitting on the windowsill in my office it sees about 30 WiFi signals. Using the USB-N66 in the same location I logged 50.

WiFi range often depends more on the client computer than on the router. After all, the don't enjoy the nice tall antennas that ASUS uses! And their radios have to operate inside of inherently electrically noisy equipment.