[Dxspider-support] Linksys Routers - a new bag of tricks

[Mike McCarthy, W1NR]

Charlie,
   There are a couple of things that you should check.

   Do any of your neighbors have wireless?  Windows XP will report all
the wireless AP's that it can see.  I found in my neighborhood, I can
see 4 other wireless routers.  All of them are on channel 6.  Some of
the adapters have a utility that mimics this function.  It's called
"Site Monitor" and works under Windows 2k and 98.  Cordless phones
generally change channels by themselves to avoid your router.
   I am not familiar with the Linksys utilities, but many of the vendors
will tell you the negotiated bit rate to the AP.  If it keeps backing
down to 5.5, or 2 mbit and popping back up to 11, that is a very good
indicator of some kind of non 802.11 interference.  Staying at 11 mbit
and seeing performance variations usually indicates the presence of one
or more other access points on the same channel and close enough to flow
control your PC's or cause collisions.  The 11 mbit rate is the physical
burst rate.  3 mbit is decent performance for one PC.  You need to
divide the performance by each PC on the net and subtract a bit more for
overhead
   Does the performance go up if you move the PC's closer to the router?
Does the performance change if you change the position of the router or
antenna?  Is there a signal strength/link quality indicator in the
utilities?
   Are the two PC's near each other?  I.E. "hidden transmitter"
collisions, just like packet radio, can degrade performance.  If the
PC's can't hear each other, there will be collisions.
   Unfortunately, 2.4 GHz is a VERY crowded band.

Mike, W1NR


-----Original Message-----
From: dxspider-support-bounces at dxcluster.org
[mailto:dxspider-support-bounces at dxcluster.org]On Behalf Of charlie
carroll
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2004 8:08 PM
To: dxspider-support at dxcluster.org; mdurham at mchsi.com
Subject: [Dxspider-support] Linksys Routers - a new bag of tricks


While still living in NH, I used a single ethernet port Linksys router
and an external hub.  Whatever problems that may have been in the router
were masked by a rather poor ISP.  Since moving to FL, I decided not to
pull cables in this new house and changed to a Linksys 802.11b wireless
router (BEFW11S4).  My node is connected via ethernet to the router, but
2 computers in other parts of the house use wireless links.

For some time I've been experiencing inconsistent download performance
on the wireless PCs.  Last weekend I brought home my laptop from work to
do some testing.  The 2 computers in the house each run Win2k and the
Linksys WMP11 wireless PCI adapter.  The Dell laptop uses XP Pro and an
internal wireless adapter.  The laptop also contains an ethernet
interface which can be used instead of the wireless adapter.

Pretty quickly I determined that the problems seemed to be with the PCI
adapters in the Win2k PCs.  The laptop had excellent and consistent
(>2.5Mbit/sec) download performance whether in the wired or wireless
mode.  Unfortunately, the use of a 3rd PCI adapter card provided equally
as poor and inconsistent throughput performance.  So, back to square
one.

I made sure the router had the latest firmware since I'd seen a few
internet references to poor router firmware performance.  I also spent a
lot of time researching problems associated with this router.  Today I
brought home a list of things to try based on my research and purported
fixes that seemed to continually appear.

These fixes were:
1. disable the DHCP server and use static IPs
2. make sure the 12 volt supply was correct
3. use a subnet mask of 255.255.255.128
4. use an exaggerated hard reset sequence

Disabling the DHCP server didn't seem to have any effect; I use static
IPs anyways.  The 12 volt supply level was correct.  Strangely enough,
changing the subnet mask to 255.255.255.128 did have a positive effect.
I started to see throughput >2Mbit on the W2k machines, but it was still
inconsistent.  And last was the exaggerated hard reset sequence.
Believe it or not, Bingo, super throughput on both W2k machines.  I'm
constantly seeing between 2.5 and 2.8Mbit/sec on both machines

Here's the reset sequence quoted from the web site...

"Install the latest firmware. Do a real hard restart. Press the reset
button, hold for 30 seconds, unplug for at least a couple of minutes,
press the reset button and plug in, hold the reset button for at least
30 seconds.
Set up static ip addressing, subnet mask 255.255.255.128. Make sure
wireless is enabled. I'm not sure, but DCHP is enabled. I rarely lose my
wireless."

After the success with the reset technique, I went back to the normal
255.255.255.0 subnet mask.  If there was a change, I could't see it.

I did make one other change.  To avoid potential interference from a
wireless phone in my house, I changed from wireless default channel 6 to
channel 11.  I could see right away that my performance went down
again.  So, instead of channel 6, I changed to channel 1.  Back to the
good performance.  Is there a difference between channels 1 and 6?  It's
hard to say, but it's at least a way to avoid a potential conflict with
the telephone.

So, for those who suffer through Linksys router problems and dutifully
make sure they've upgraded to the latest firmware as preached by all
technical support organization, there is hope.  Try the exaggerated
reset trick; it might work for you too.  By the way, Linksys support
could best be classified as useless even with 3 hours on the phone one
night.

The best source I found for a lot of good info was the Linksys forum on
www.dslreports.com.

73 charlie, k1xx/4

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