Out of Cheese

I complained a while back that my home wireless network was having problems. After a few days, I realized that the problems were due to poor channel selection and changed the channel on my graphite base station.

That helped for a little while, but not for long. The first-generation AirPort base stations don’t to automatic channel selection, so as the neighbors’ access points jumped around to other channels they started to interfere with my base station.

I figured a newer base station would work much better, so I bought an AirPort Extreme base station this week. I got the version with antenna support so if the channel selection support didn’t work I could just buy an antenna and blast a stronger signal than the neighbors. (Take that, you WiFi weaklings!)

It looks like I won’t have to declare a signal strength war after all. With the new base station set up, I’m seeing four bars on my PowerBooks for the first time since I moved here. Since they’re only about five feet away from the base station I should have had that all along, but the old base station just couldn’t do that without a lot of hand-holding. The new one works great, even though I’m not using 802.11g at all.