Linksys WAP54G
The LinkSys WAP54G is a standard consumer grade wireless access point, made for SOHO use and fairly good out of the box. It enables you to connect wireless devices to your wired network, has a bridge mode, etc. I basically use it as a wireless access point to my wired network at home, and it does the job.....almost good enough.
Relevant Links
I started wanting to increase the signal strength on the WAP54G so that I could watch movies in the top floor of my house. I live in a split level with four levels to the house, and had the access point in the lowest level, so from the top level the signal strength was kind of low. Movies were watchable, but not as smooth as I would like. Because we have 802.11b cards in our laptops here, the maximum bandwidth was going to be 11Mbit no matter what, and I wanted to make sure I was getting every byte of that.
The default power output of the WAP54G is 28 milliwatts, so the first thing I did was boost that. I did so using SNMP to pass values to the firmware on the access point, which was a somewhat complicated procedure not worth documenting here. There is a better way, and I'll be getting to that later. By boosting the signal strength, I was able to get a substantially better signal, and that made me want to quantify it and see just how much better of a signal I could get.