Wifi woes - solved

[feder1]

PC 1 - 2 yo

Normally used with ethernet but it has two antennae at the back. With ethernet it does 100 Mb/s and with wifi it did 0.19.

After contacting Virgin Media they did something remotely and the wifi achieved 40! Today the VM switched off transmission and later when it came back on, the wifi was terrible. After messing with antennae and removing dust, the wifi works with a good signal! All very strange. Could a dust coating have muffled the signal all along?

PC2 - new.

This was positioned upstairs and received about 5 units. Useless.

We replaced the existing new small receiving dongle (or whatever it is called) with a Belkin thing and it gets about 50! So all OK now.

-0-

Further reading has told us that the router gets full of dust and needs regular cleaning!

We hope this might help someone with similar problems.

[servodude]

PC 1 - 2 yo

Normally used with ethernet but it has two antennae at the back. With ethernet it does 100 Mb/s and with wifi it did 0.19.

After contacting Virgin Media they did something remotely and the wifi achieved 40! Today the VM switched off transmission and later when it came back on, the wifi was terrible. After messing with antennae and removing dust, the wifi works with a good signal! All very strange. Could a dust coating have muffled the signal all along?

PC2 - new.

This was positioned upstairs and received about 5 units. Useless.

We replaced the existing new small receiving dongle (or whatever it is called) with a Belkin thing and it gets about 50! So all OK now.

-0-

Further reading has told us that the router gets full of dust and needs regular cleaning!

We hope this might help someone with similar problems.

wiggling, moving, re-screwing, jiggling can all help a loose contact mate better with it's other side and I suspect that's what's happened. I'm guessing the antenna connector is probably of the SMC type (if a real connector at all!); and if you have look at it you'll see why it can be a bit flaky, there's very little contact area and there's no real spring force to grab the pin side.
- unless the dust is conductive it's unlikely to have made much difference to the antenna (I've been hit with that but it took iron rich sand on outdoor UHF broomsticks - that's another story)

If it goes out again give it a wiggle; you can get phone apps that show the RSSI (received signal strength) in real time for wifi apns, so you can see if/when it makes a difference
- otherwise you can always buy a new microwave
-sd