Well, to be quite honest, I haven’t defeated any trees, I’ve just gone around them. I relocated my wireless internet antenna yesterday so that I had a clear line-of-sight position to the Access point (AP).
I borrowed my Dad’s binoculars, and searched out the actual location of the AP and then chose the best place along the house to put the Antenna. However, I was limited to a reach of 1.8 metres as that was the length of the Antenna base pole which I’d bought.
Dad gave me a hand putting it up, and we did, just before it rained and I have a stable, normal connection again. Luckily, I live opposite a ‘T’ intersection so it is highly doubtful that anything will obstruct it’s new position.
I have a problem. Well, if I wasn’t a gamer, I wouldn’t have a problem – although I might in a few weeks – but I am so I have a big problem.
Since the beginning of September, the world has changed around us, specifically trees. Decidious ones, to be precise. My wireless antenna had perfect line of sight – I thought – to the Access point (AP) that I connect to. However, it seems as though my line of sight actually went through a tree in front of my house. Now that it’s Spring, it’s starting to grow leaves and this week I’ve noticed a substantial drop in my internet access’s performance.
Symptoms include;
- Slow connection speed (the time it takes to actually connect to the network)
- Slow to non-existant pings to servers (via cmd prompt)
- Unplayable pings in World of Warcraft (I did say I was a gamer)
So, it is probably obvious that I’m going to have to move my antenna to get a better line of sight to the AP. The problem here is that it’s currently mounted on the Television Aerial mount and there’s no other mounting point available on the roof. I will have to construct one.
Another problem is that I had trouble finding the exact point of the AP. I have a location on a map, but I took a drive today to a) verify the position and b) to see if I could see my house from there, but I couldn’t find it at the location specified.
One thing that I do not understand, however, is that pings in other games, like Team Fortress 2 are fine. So I’m not sure what’s going on there.
I’ve been using Cirrus Wireless internet for about 4 weeks now, and I have to say I’m pretty happy with it. To set it up, my brother and I just rigged it up with the brackets it came with to the TV antenna on the front of the house, directed at the AP to the south of my house and ran a network cable from the antenna to my study.
We had some fun deciding how to get the cable into the house; we tried looking in the ceiling, but thought it was going to be too much hassle to lift tiles and get it in. In the end, we decided to drill a hole through the window frame of my study and run it along the gutter to that point then in through the hole. In the event of moving out (as it’s a rental) we’ll have to fill the hole with gap filler or something.
I need to get a custom cable made up too, as I’m currently using a 50 metre cable and there’s about 20m of it coiled up in my study, and the end in my study had the clip broken off some time ago, so it sometimes comes out of the adapter (which sends power up the line), which means a 10 minute wait before it reconnects again.
Configuration was pretty simple too, just create a connection up in Windows, a bit like a dialup connection. Then I can share that connection and have Windows run it’s ICS (Internet Connection Sharing – acts like a DHCP server) to hand out IP addresses to other computers on the network.
The only issue I do have with it is that during really poor weather it won’t connect, and currently the TV antenna pole is just a slight amount too small for the brackets so it’s vulnerable to a really strong wind blowing it off alignment with the AP (Access Point). The weather I can’t do anything about, but I need to get some more washers and put them up – probably when I get the new network cable for it.
All in all, a big thumbs up from me for Cirrus.
For those of you who might have been following my ‘personal’ blog, over at LiveJournal, you might remember the posts I’ve been making in regards to my internet access.
Well, finally, I’ve been able to pay for my wireless kit from Cirrus and it’s been sent out. It should arrive on Monday (couriers apparently don’t work on weekends), after which I’ll have to set it up on the roof of the house.
The assembly and configuration of which I’ll document here in case anyone else is interested in looking into these guys.
