My domain is hosted on a machine that is twice removed from a wired connection to the Internet. That is, traffic to my site goes through two 802.11b connections, one provided by the local neighborhood WLAN, and another provided by the local co-op, largely because I live in a somewhat rural area not serviced by DSL or Cable Internet. The first hop from my site is a half-mile, and the second hop is four miles.
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed some odd behavior. My signal appears to drop off dramatically for periods of time, most pronounced when there is snow on the ground, which I haven’t figured out. Most of the time the connection is perfect, but the occasional behavior is to lose signal strength during the day, and it comes back up at night. I have clear line of sight over that first hop, so it’s not something simple like snowplows parking in the way. I watch signal strength on the /proc entry for the driver that I use for my Aironet 340.
Today when I noticed the signal strength was down pretty low, I tore down my firewall with my wireless NIC and took it out on my deck. I didn’t use my fixed antenna, I used the little rubber-ducky that came with the NIC, and got better signal strength than the fixed antenna was providing. The fixed antenna has a little bit of obscuring by my neighbors trees, but the main difference may be that the fixed location is under the eaves of my house, and only a few inches from a picture window. But it doesn’t explain that it works fine most of the time, and I’ve only been able to correlate it with the snowfall. I’m going to move the antenna.