moa5505

Hello everyone ! I am kind of new in this forum, this is my first post, but I have been lurking a lot these last few days. I wanted to describe you a small project of mine and some problems I have been having. Maybe my project could give some ideas to others and/or maybe you could have an idea to solve the problems I currently have. So I am currently living in a small apartment in a medium density residential area (some small building and individual houses around). When I arrived here I noticed there was a public access wifi (in which you had to enter some identification), since it was working quite well I didn't bother to pay for an internet connection. The first problem was that the signal was quite low (depending on where I was in my apartment I couldn't connect) and I had to enter a password every 2 hours... I solved this by placing a raspberry pi in a specific corner in my apartment and programming it to check the connection every 10 seconds and automatically send my credentials to connect if no internet was available. This worked very well for a few months, but a few weeks ago the wifi I was using for this went offline... To solve this I bought a better receptor (Alfa AWUS036NH) and a better antenna (TP-link ANT2409A), boosted the transmission to 30dBm (1W) and pointed the antenna to another building. And it worked ! I had internet again ! But I noticed the speed of the connection was much slower than before it's usable, but it's very very slow ... I can barely watch a 360p video without lag ... So now that I presented my project I am exposing my problem. I have a quite good signal (-70dBm), and since my transmission is made with 1W, the router should not have any problem in receiving my packets, but I have a very high rate of TX retries (300%). I tried to move the antenna a bit, but nothing seems to change this. I also tried to block the transmission rate at a lower bitrate (5.5MBit) hoping that it would solve my problem, but again no change ... Does someone has an idea on why my setup is not working correctly ? (I attached a screenshot of the main information of the connection)

You guys make it seems like some kind of art/witchcraft rather than an exact science

I will try to put some aluminum behind the antenna to see if it improves something, Thanks !

Nice Thanks for the explanation ! I don't plan on changing my antenna (or buying cables) at the moment, but it could be a option. I'll keep that in mind.

Rotating the antenna kind of works, I get a lesser signal (-74dBm), but a much lower retry rate (120%) and watching a 360p video is now clearly possible. I will keep it like that for the moment. Building an antenna sounds fun, but I don't have any tools at the moment. I will save your schematics though, thanks ! What are the specs of the one on top ? Is it a directional or omnidirectional antenna ?

The specification says it's 9dB, but I don't know about real case usage. Anyway, I'm not convinced that a better antenna would be a solution since I already have a pretty good signal (I don't know about the router though ...). I was thinking this is a problem caused by the distance (packets have to travel to much time and this delay causes the devices to think the packets were lost). Why do you believe a better antenna could be a solution ?