This evening I settled on my deck to do some work, and couldn’t “see” the wireless network at all. I know that it has worked out here in the past, and the only thing that changed is that now all my networking stuff is in a steel rack, which, I suppose, is acting like a Faraday cage. So, I went over to CompUSA and acquired a 7DBi antenna to hang off of my AP, in the hopes that it would greatly enhance my signal.

Well, it’s better, certainly, in the sense that I can connect now, and I couldn’t before. But I still am only getting only a signal of 30 out here, whereas inside the back door I get 40. So it’s rather disappointing. I don’t know what is blocking the signal, and I can’t bring the antenna much farther out without spending a LOT of money on cables. And I don’t know how much signal loss there is if I just hack something together with coax. Perhaps I should give it a try and see what happens.