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admin on Friday, January 8th, 2010 |
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Buyer Beware – Ignorance can be a financial waste and a lot of hassals. Before you buy any wireless equipment, you need to be sure about what you’re doing. There’s nothing worse than having everything there and finding that it doesn’t work in your house, or with your computers, or over the distances you need. Here’s a handy checklist of the things that you really ought to do before you go out and spend any of your hard-earned cash on wireless networking equipment.
Interference Checks
While it won’t stop a wireless network from working altogether, interference in its frequency range can slow it down significantly, as well as reducing its range. If something is causing interference, the first thing you’ll know about it is when your connection stops working — unless you know what to look for.
There are two very common causes of wireless interference: wireless phones and microwave ovens. 2.4Ghz, the most common wireless networking frequency, is also a commonly-used wireless phone frequency. It is possible, though, to find phones that use other frequencies. Microwave ovens, on the other hand, operate at around 2.4Ghz by definition. It should be alright to have devices like these in your house, but certainly not in the same room as any computer that you plan to use a wireless connection with.
Wall Construction
Wireless can, in theory, pass through walls and other partitions easily. In practice, though, some walls are more solid than others, which means that they are more likely to… Read the rest
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admin on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 |
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Wireless networks use radio waves instead of wires to transmit data between computers. Here’s how:
The Binary Code: 1s and 0s
It’s well known that computers transmit information digitally, using binary code: ones and zeros. This translates well to radio waves, since those 1s and 0s can be represented by different kinds of beeps. These beeps are so fast that they’re outside the hearing range of humans.
Morse Code: Dots And Dashes
It works like Morse code, which is a way to transmit the alphabet over radio waves using dots (short beeps) and dashes (long beeps). Morse code was used manually for years via telegraph to get information from 1 place to another very quickly. More importantly for this example, though, it is a binary system, just as a computer system is.
Wireless networking, then, can be thought of as a Morse code for computers. You plug in a combined radio receiver and transmitter, and the computer is able to send out its equivalent of dots and dashes (bits, in computer-speak) to get your data from here to there.
Wavelengths And Frequencies
You might wonder how the computer can send and receive data at high speed without becoming garbled nonsense. The key to wireless networking is how it gets around this problem.
First, wireless transmissions are sent at very high frequencies, which allows more data to be sent per second. Most wireless connections use a frequency of 2.4 gigahertz (2.4 billion cycles per second) — a frequency similar to mobile… Read the rest