[rsajdak]

Does anyone with an iPAQ 5450 experience poor WiFi signal reception? I have a 5450 and a laptop with an 802.11 (Netgear) PC card. When the laptop gets a good signal (approximately 80%), the best my iPAQ gets is 40%. Sometimes it doesn't see a signal at all!

Is this a characteristic of using WiFi on a handheld or does my machine sound defective?

[rsajdak]

Does anyone with an iPAQ 5450 experience poor WiFi signal reception? I have a 5450 and a laptop with an 802.11 (Netgear) PC card. When the laptop gets a good signal (approximately 80%), the best my iPAQ gets is 40%. Sometimes it doesn't see a signal at all!

Is this a characteristic of using WiFi on a handheld or does my machine sound defective?

[Gremmie]

Signal is a large function of milliwatts. Obviously handhelds don't have much milliwatts to spare, while laptops can get up to 200mW. Also, internal wireless works against electrical noise and plastics, nevertheless, signal strength only determines how far you can go with it, its link quality that matters. People complain when they stand over their router they only get a low x%. Typically the link quality (speed) is good. Now, if the signal is weak this means you can't go as far as your laptop before u lose signal. If you have a 1% signal, you still could get 11Mbps, however, at 1% it tends to lose the connection even standing still.

[TopDog]

I have a batteryeating AmbiCom CF-card to my iPAQ 3970, and I get excelent signal reception, often much better than any laptop.

... but this CF-card eats batterypower, and I don't get many hours of use if I don't use the additional battery on my CF+ jacket.

[dangerwit]

Gremmie is correct, the mW usage of a card is the overwhelming factor in signal strength. For example, most home wifi setups use access points and radio cards that use 30mW (e.g. LinkSys, D-Link). Commercial setups, however, will use 100 mW which I believe is the USA non-military maximum. An example is the ever-popular Cisco 350 series and above.

I work heavily with both setups (30/100 mW) at work and the Cisco Aironet 340 (30 mW max) has a huge disadvantage over the 350 (100 mW). The coverage isn't just 30% worse, but its actually some sort of factor in the exponential range worse. Note that if you use an access point, make sure it doesn't have a power setting in its configuration. Most don't but some do require you to input what power level to use.

Finally, remember that signal "strength" is not nearly as important as signal "quality". A wifi rep. brought that to my attention once, and was correct. If you have 2% strength, data still goes through, so long as the quality is high. 40% quality, OTOH, spells bad news.

*Phil

[dangerwit]

I should add that you may want to check the radio card settings on your ipaq. The card should have installed a prog or two to adjust the card settings. Use that prog to make sure you have power saving mode disabled and that you are using the maximum transmit power allowed.

*Phil

[that_kid]

So far the wifi performance on my 5450 seems the same as my 3970 with a lucnet card. I can get all the way to the beginning of my complex before I lose the signal. Come to think of it, I have power management eabled on the ipaq so maybe I can go further with it off.....hmmm

[bigkingfun]

I can't say that I've done any formal tests, but my seat-of-the-pants feeling is that my 5450's wifi reception is pretty good.

I just switched from an e740 a few days ago and the 5450's connections are stronger and faster than my e740 was in the same networks. Whether this is due to the antenna or something else I can't say. My laptop wifi gets a little stronger signal, but the previous posts sound like a reasonable explanation for that.