Wireless signal constantly fluctuates between -30 to -95dB, is this fixable?

Question

My current ISP recently replaced or old modem with a new one with a built in router with wireless access. Because of this I decided just connect everything on that new router using switches, because I was getting conflicts for printing from wireless to my network printer, because it was on another IP range. Also the wireless on the new router seemed faster than my old one (Linksys WRT160N V3).

This new router however has a very limited configuration, and it gives out another IP almost every time a computer was shutdown for some time. This is very annoying, since I have a few services running on my laptop and desktop (eg. Unified Remote) that I need to reconfigure every time this happened.

So I decided to get my old router back in the game and just disable wireless on the new router. But when configuring, I noticed something strange while analyzing my wireless networks to find a good channel (using inSSIDer).

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This is the output:

(yellow is my old router, the green and blue ones are my providers public and private access points)

larger image

Does anybody know why this is happening, does this mean my router is dead (well at least the wireless part)?

Can this be fixed?.. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

-95dBm is likely the noise floor of wireless card, so when InSSIDer reports the RSSI of a network as -95dBm, it's basically saying "zero" or "no signal received" or "we didn't receive a Beacon or Probe Response from that SSID during that time interval". It's a shame that InSSIDer graphs this as a dramatic drop to -95dBm and a dramatic rise afterward. I believe it would be better represented by must leaving a gap in the yellow line graph in those intervals. So the yellow line should look like a dotted line with minimal up/down movement, hovering around -30dBm.

This could be a bug in how InSSIDer does scans, or it could mean that your WRT160N isn't reliably sending out Beacons or responding to Probe Requests. Was the WRT160N connected to anything at the time? Is there any chance it was being spammed with multicasts or broadcasts or something? It's easy to overload an AP with multicasts/broadcasts, and and overloaded AP might not reply to Probe Responses reliably.

It could also mean that your client device running InSSIDer was so close to your WRT160N that the WRT160N's signal was so hot (loud) that it overloaded the receiver (radio front-end) on your client's Wi-Fi card, causing distortion that made half of the Beacons or Probe Responses unintelligible. Try moving your InSSIDer machine farther away from your WRT160N so that the upper value of the graph is between -40 and -65dBm. I've seen some cheap Wi-Fi NICs that can't handle signals hotter than -40dBm. Maybe you'll be able to receive all packets more reliably without distortion if you keep the signal below -30dBm.

It could also mean that your antenna connections inside your WRT160N are loose, sometimes making a good connection and sometimes not, but that seems like the least likely possibility.