Repeater working but the signal strength varies

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TomatoJan
TomatoJan's picture
Repeater working but the signal strength varies

Hello all,
I recently purchased a 3500Lv2 and installed Shibby's 1.28 MIPSR2-090 K26 USB AIO, and set it up as the repeater node onto a Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato 1.28, both set using the same SSID, same password, using WPA Personal + AES, and Access Point + WDS mode on both.

It seems to be working ok, but I've noticed that when my phone or laptop first makes a connection to the network near one router (let's call it A), and I walk away from it toward the second router (let's call it B), the signal fades and doesn't gain strength as I get closer to router B. I would have thought that the signal would get stronger whether I'm near one router or the other. While standing next to router B, if I disconnect the connection I originally made while standing near router A, and remake the connection to the SSID while standing near B, the new connection then is strong. The same happens in reverse: If make a new connection with my phone or laptop to the SSID while standing near B (strong signal), and walk over to the A router, the signal is weak, but gets strong only if I disconnect and reconnect while standing at A.

Why is there no seemlessness between the two routers? Is there a setting which I can change which will improve this situation?

Thanks for any thoughts.

whit
whit's picture
I can't say for sure. My

I can't say for sure. My setup's different. I have a 3500Lv2 with Shibby's 102 installed running in fairly standard mode as the primary, then a Rosewill RNS-N150RT running Brainslayer's 10/12/12 (i.e. Dec. 12) beta of DD-WRT as the secondary in a "repeater bridge" arrangement (pretty much following the recipe here: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Repeater_Bridge). Some devices will roam on their own between the two - an Android phone, a Linux netbook - but then a Macbook Air so far seems content to stay with the primary as long as it can reach it. And even the devices that roam automatically wait until the first AP they connected to is nearly out of range.

In any case, I think it's necessarily up to the devices whether and when to roam to a second AP, not up to the APs. So if there's anything that's tunable about this, that might be where to look.