Alfa awus036h - Distance is terrible

[0phoi5]

Hi all,

I'm using an Alfa AWUS036h with a 7dbi directional.

I would have thought, through general reading-up, I would have gotten around 100-200 meters worth of distance with these. However, it's only picking up access points up to around 70m away, and I tried connecting to my WiFi from only 42m away and it fails to connect, even though it sees the access point.

The line-of-sight is only broken by one exterior wall. TX power is currently out-of-the-box at 24 dBm.

Most of the access points have worse-than-I-would-have-hoped-for signal strength, with most being worse than -60 PWR, even for access points that are less than 30m away!

Any thoughts on how to improve this / why this happening?

Thanks. 

Edited July 14, 2016 by haze1434

[datajumper]

have you tried   setting your   iw reg set BO

and  iwconfig wlan0 txpower 30 

i think you have to do a ifconfig  wlan(x)  down first

if that doesnt work get a higher gain antenna  the ones at the hakshop  work great and for a reasonable price

i have a couple of the they work great for me   ...great distance as well 

i also have a 25dbi parabolic antenna   its a tplink ?  im not sure   ..and im not cimbing in the roof to get the model # lol

but its awsome i have it on a pole with an antenna rotator wich i can control from the control box in my server room

but back to your situation  try to increase your txpower  note doing this sometime will heat the chipset up quite a bit

so if you have any little raspberry pi heasinks lying around or some little thermal pads to keep it cool so you dont burn you card up

like i did lol   i've had to replace a few lol  

and try to place the card/antenna in a higher position  maybe even a 2 watt external  sma 2.4ghz wifi amplifier  amazon and ebay is full of them

the hak shop has some but last i checked they were outrageous ...like 50?  dollars  idk

im sorry if this didnt help your situation  .....i tried lol

 

[datajumper]

hey also very cheaply i just bought an etekcity ? i've never heard of than name in my life  but i bought it to try it out

its pretty cool it has dual sma connections for two antennas on the same raidio  and its running ralink rt???  i dont remember but its a ralink chipset

and it kinda out performs my  alfa AWUS036NH   ha ha i had this card close by so i can read the lable lol 

but no kidding i think it was in the 10 / 15 dollar range on amazon 

wait i went and found it ...here it is    check this out and see what you think   https://www.amazon.com/Etekcity-Wireless-Network-Adapter-Antenna/dp/B006JWMOOI

for the money its alright in my book so far   i did get some little raspberry pi heat sinks just because they fit well in the  housing as long as you get thr right

heatsinks  see when you buy raspberry pi heat sinks they usually come in a set of 3  you have 2 little bit bigger ones  and a small one thats the one you can use on your chipset  ifconfig wlan?  down  .....

then do the      iw reg set BO

then the  iwconfig wlan0 txpower 30

the ifconfig wlan? up

and i dont care what anyone says if they think im crazy about putting heatsinks on the chipset/s on wifi adapters i have learned from

expierience  that it will burn the chipset out when you increase your txpower 

so like i said man i really hope this helps you ...  if not someone else with more expierience  may come along with an answer for you

cheers  and good luck