This evening I was at one of my access points... one that has several backhauls and various 2.4 and 5 ghz ap's at it.
After I was done with my few minutes of doing things, I wanted to make sure I had not physically disconnected or accidentally unhooked anything (messing with the batteries, checking water levels, etc). I pulled out a netbook. Acer Aspire One to be precise, running windows xp, using the normal wifi card it came with. I fired it up (it is set to "any" so it simply associates to the access points that are open at home, work, etc), and after I was done, noted it said it was connected, at which point I opened google on the browser to confirm connectivity. Google popped up, meaning things were connected, and then I decided to run a speed test. I got about 30KB/s speed, which is like painfully slow. I was standing outside, with the netbook sitting on the hood of my truck. So, I decided to see what it was associated to, and it was another access point ... 11 MILES AWAY! I confirmed it by the SSID and by the ip dhcp had assigned, as belonging to the ap 11 miles distant. It has no external antenna, just the one the factory built into the netbook. I have detected, using netstumbler and the internal antenna on my laptop (dell C610 and CM9 installed) access points over 24 miles away before, but this is the longest, by far, I have been able to get a real connection, dhcp assignment, and transfer data. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Neofast, Inc, Making internet easy 541-969-8200 509-386-4589 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/