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Well, it all started when I applied for ADSL...
I live with my parents (I'm only 18), and to help with uni we applied for ADSL (which has only recently been activated at our exchange). To cut a long story short, because I live in a seperate part of the house (detached from the main bit), I decided it was easy enough to set up a wireless network from their office (in the middle of the house) to my room (about 10-15m or so away), as a wired network was impractical. I got the gear from work, took it home and had all sorts of trouble. Installing the wireless card in my machine was easy as, setting up the wireless ADSL router was fine, but then I wasn't able to connect to the wireless router from my machine. After 2 nights of feverish activity and a lot of frustration, we able to get a signal (a crappy one, mind you) from a window about 5 metres or so from my machine. Anywhere else in the house, including places where it was within line of sight of the machine, the router could not connect to my machine. Last night I grabbed another of each of the wireless card and the router, to see if it was a hardware problem, but I still had the same problems. (The router is a D-Link 604T and the wireless card is a Netgear WG311v3 wireless network PCI card)
After all this, last night we worked out why: the sides of the house and the roof are painted with a special heat resistant paint, which reflects light and heat away from the hose, effectively making the house cooler in summer. However, as the radio signals are close in the spectrum to heat (which was confirmed by my boss), the network signals are not able to pass through the wall and the paint, so a connection cannot be estableshed. In some places, the signal can get through, but the signal is low, the speed is low, and Windows screws around because it cant be allocated an address. So, it really doesn't work at all, much to my disappointment.
Now, for the question: is there any way of improving the range of the router, or the wireless card, or both? Is there something (other than another wireless access point, which I don't want to do) that can penetrate the paint, and still give a good signal strength and data rate, no matter where the router is? And what other factors do I need to take into account to get it to work (bouncing off walls, angles etc)?
I would love, or rather NEED this to work, so that I can access our home network, and the internet, whenever I want or need it. So, I just need some ideas to try and solve this problem. If you need diagrams or any other information, just let me know and I'll (try) to put them up.
Thanks in advance.
I live with my parents (I'm only 18), and to help with uni we applied for ADSL (which has only recently been activated at our exchange). To cut a long story short, because I live in a seperate part of the house (detached from the main bit), I decided it was easy enough to set up a wireless network from their office (in the middle of the house) to my room (about 10-15m or so away), as a wired network was impractical. I got the gear from work, took it home and had all sorts of trouble. Installing the wireless card in my machine was easy as, setting up the wireless ADSL router was fine, but then I wasn't able to connect to the wireless router from my machine. After 2 nights of feverish activity and a lot of frustration, we able to get a signal (a crappy one, mind you) from a window about 5 metres or so from my machine. Anywhere else in the house, including places where it was within line of sight of the machine, the router could not connect to my machine. Last night I grabbed another of each of the wireless card and the router, to see if it was a hardware problem, but I still had the same problems. (The router is a D-Link 604T and the wireless card is a Netgear WG311v3 wireless network PCI card)
After all this, last night we worked out why: the sides of the house and the roof are painted with a special heat resistant paint, which reflects light and heat away from the hose, effectively making the house cooler in summer. However, as the radio signals are close in the spectrum to heat (which was confirmed by my boss), the network signals are not able to pass through the wall and the paint, so a connection cannot be estableshed. In some places, the signal can get through, but the signal is low, the speed is low, and Windows screws around because it cant be allocated an address. So, it really doesn't work at all, much to my disappointment.
Now, for the question: is there any way of improving the range of the router, or the wireless card, or both? Is there something (other than another wireless access point, which I don't want to do) that can penetrate the paint, and still give a good signal strength and data rate, no matter where the router is? And what other factors do I need to take into account to get it to work (bouncing off walls, angles etc)?
I would love, or rather NEED this to work, so that I can access our home network, and the internet, whenever I want or need it. So, I just need some ideas to try and solve this problem. If you need diagrams or any other information, just let me know and I'll (try) to put them up.
Thanks in advance.