barofsoap

Just wanted to put this up here for others having trouble.

The WRT54G is across the street. It has no mods, and cannot be moved. My goal was to share internet access between these two houses. With other cards I could get crap signal from my living room (LoS to their house through the window) and nothing from my room (one wall inward from the living room). I tried and tried and nothing has helped until just recently I "stumbled" on a set of things that made it work famously.

Basically this SMC rebadge of the above mentioned ZCOM/ZCOMAX 200mW card has excellent signal strength grabbing abilities but what appears to be driver issues. I always got great signals with the NDIS5.1 driver selected in NS, and none/terrible with the Prism2. I realize that NDIS support is buggy at best in NS and that it doesn't report noise, but still, my signal strength was -50, -40 most of the time with NDIS (Which should be enough to get online--right?). With Prism, it went down a bit but more importantly it would lose the AP at random intervals. I therefore concluded that there was something wrong with the Prism driver since Windows would exhibit the same behavior (link, no connection, link, no connection... ad nauseum). I tried about 100 different drivers until I found (under " " aka "blank" manufacturer in Driver Update Wizard) a default 802.11b driver. Loaded it despite the idiot warnings (5V version) and it works great. Netstumbler now has only a NDIS5.1 and ORINOCO(?!) option in the device select area. Obviously the Orinoco doesn't work. My connection is stable now, it doesn't turn on and off, and my signal strength seems great (cars parked on the street used to block it but don't anymore).

Downsides: No signal meter on the WiFi connection in the tray, none of the 5 or so connection strength monitors I have work (they're for Prism, duh!). I have to set the options (ESSID: Any, etc) in the card's properties in Device Manager. No big deal.

Secondly, I tried to get the antenna to work better on the cheap. After much testing I figured out (thanks to the search function) that the antenna connector closest to the user when plugged into the laptop is the Tx/Rx one and the other is only for Rx (or is it Tx? whatever). The card does diversity so it just chooses the best one. So I took off the plastic housing on the detachable antenna (it's just got a little spot of super glue, just shimmy in there with a small flathead or butter knife and pry), plugged in ONE of the connectors to the aforementioned plug, and tilted it around. At a certain angle I get 2-3x better LINK strength than otherwise.

Hope this helps someone.

Edit:
Forgot 2 things. First, I also stopped and disabled wireless zero config service in control panel/admin tools/services. Second, I'm considering buying this: http://shop.vetcosurplus.com/catalog...roducts_id=773 and soldering the open end to the antenna (easy job). Any thoughts on that? I should be able to move it up and away from the monitor and docking station which I think are causing some signal loss.