Nathanael Boehm on web user experience design, the Internet, social networking & free wireless

Posted by Nathanael Boehm on November 17th, 2007 in Free Australia Wireless, General

I should preface this post with a disclaimer that no scientific research or analysis was performed here. Basically, something wasn’t working so I tried something different and it worked. So I cannot 100% verify the validity of the experiment.

Basically last week I purchased a 15 metre long CAT5 Ethernet network cable so I could place my indoor Meraki unit on my window sill for better signal strength to neighbouring houses. It was originally just sitting on a bookshelf in my room, so it was only a move of about a metre.

However, as soon as I had moved the Meraki my repeater node downstairs started to intermittently fail - in fact the following day it went down over 20 times and the uptime graph in the Dashboard was just a big mess of red and green (like when you defrag your hard drive for the first time in 3 years).

Freya suggested it might be interference from the aluminium window frame or the flyscreen.

I had already hard-patched into the repeater node downstairs and was getting around 32-35 dB signal strength so the signal was fine, it was something else.

I can’t remember much of my electromagnetism or whatever theory from school but I figured if it was the window frame then taking into account the angles and proximity of the frame I simply moved the Meraki from just resting on the window sill and mounted it using the double-sided tape that comes with the unit and placing it about a foot up the window frame.

The mesh network functioned fine after that and not a single instance of downtime since!

Tags: amaroo, error, failure, freethenet, installation, internet, meraki, merakimini, meshnetwork, problem, wifi, wireless