you might might remember that

the snowdeal show ®

required us to move into a large 3-floor ( well, 4 floors actually,
if you consider the basement ) victorian which was built in 1890.
naturally, getting a solid wireless connection throughout the house
has been a top priority.

initially the access point and cable modem were placed on the third
floor since that’s where my home office is setup and where comcast
dropped the “data” cable. an initial site survey showed that the
signal strength was great on the third floor ( 4 bars on a mac),
passable ( 2 bars ) with holes on the first floor, and nonexistant
in the basement. given this data, i was initially just going to
repurpose my aging

linksys BEFW11S4

and slap on some

range extending antenna’s

, but after some additional thought, i decided to just upgrade my
ap to a

linksys wrt54g

and take advantage of

firmware hacks

to turn up the power to and get a little better coverage.

while there were a few close contenders, i ended up going with
sveasoft’s
firmware

. after you load the software on the ap, you’re presented with an
admin screen that looks deceptively like the stock screen, but with
a
boatload of new
features

, including the ability to

turn up the transmit power.

. you won’t be able to turn the ap into a 200mw monster, but i’ve
found you can increase the transmit power by 40 percent over the
factory settings and get a reliable 50 mw signal.

with a little more power, i could get getter signal on the first
floor, with the ap on the third floor but i still wasn’t getting
anything in the basement. rf signal propagation is a mystery to me
and i’ve found that theory is worthless in real world settings, so
the next logical step was to unplug the ap and start moving it
around. i had a hunch that if i centered the ap in the first floor
floorboards ( via access in the basement ) at about the middle of
the house that i’d get good coverage across all 4 floors. and
indeed, after a little empirical testing i had great coverage
everywhere, thanks to one well-placed ap and the community behind
sveasofts

. although the firmware is gpl’d, for $20 you can subscribe to get
a full year of firmware upgrades and priority support. while this
is a slightly controversial approach to subsidizing open source
code developement, it seems like a terrific bargain to me.