Loading New Firmware
After doing some googling of wireless terms, I found a decent information site for LinkSys access points at www.linksysinfo.org. Some people who frequented the site had made various modifications to the firmware, and after further searching I found that the most popular modification was made by www.sveasoft.com, who made some extreme changes to the firmware that not only allowed greater performance but much greater functionality.
Relevant Links
Firmware Settings
Though the sveasoft web forums are closed to the public at the moment, their ftp site was still up so I downloaded the
hacked firmware from there and used the upgrade function of my WAP54G to load it.
I was initially worried that I had created a doorstop, but a hard reset of the access point brought it right back to life
with my settings still intact and a bunch of new ones available. After experimenting I found that by locking the transmit
and receive to the right antenna, putting my homemade semi-parabolic reflector on that right antenna, and boosting the
power output to 75 milliwatts, I got a much higher signal strength. All that, of course, took a lot of testing and
monitoring to achieve, but it was worth it.
Better Antennas
Although it was fun creating a parabolic reflector and seeing how well it worked, I decided on a more professional approach. I took off
the stock rubber duck antennas and mounted two Cushcraft commercial omnidirectional
antennas. The signal gain was immediate and great, so I decided to mount the whole thing out of sight in a grandfather clock. The clock
is somewhat central to the house, I reasoned, so that it should give me a good signal just about anywhere.
