Posted: 8/1/2008 4:10:54 PM EDT
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I was watching a thread here a day or two ago about a noob that wanted to shore up his wireless router security. One of the posters that responded theorized that if the output of the router was reduced, and the signal could only be picked up in 20 or 30 feet, it would be much harder for someone to sniff out and crack a wireless signal. In theory, the juvenile delinquent hacker would almost have to be in my living room to hack the signal. I have a Linksys WRT54G router. Could it be adjusted to send out just enough signal to cover my house and no more? I'm pretty well secure. WPA2, MAC filtering, all the usual measures. I even turn off the router's wireless signal when I'm home and run hard wired. I saw this idea and wondered if I could do this to my router. Thanks ZM UPDATE After posting here, I did a search on Google. Seems everyone wants to increase their signal strength but no one wants to reduce it. I removed the two antennas and reduced the output to the back bedroom by at least 50 per cent. Enough to surf but the signal won't get out much farther. I'd still like to get the signal in the back room down to one or two bars. |
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I had the same problem in my apartment. The router wasn't giving out enough signal to surf the net and I was using at the time an N rated router. Figured out that the old card's antenna was facing the wall and wouldn't get a signal so I placed LINKSYS WMP300N inside the back room computer and it seem to work like a champ. |
I'm running V.3. I've been loathe to upgrade the firmware. |
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I've done it on my wrt55ag (slightly different model). I agree that it helps to reduce your exposure. I can't find the section in your model's manual for it, but if you go into the advanced mode, you should be about to find the power settings. On mine there's a section where you configure the wireless channel settings and you can set the power to full, half, quarter, etc... Would think you could do that with the default firmware, w/o going to a third party (ddwrt, etc). You can guess where my power setting is at. I'd put the antennas back on though. Transmitters don't like it when you mess with their antennas, (SWR issues and such). (you could burn out the transmitter) |
I put the antennas back on. No luck on the power settings in the advanced section of the router. Lots of other settings but no settings to adjust the signal output. |
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You people are paranoid... leave the antennas on the box. Block all ports and only open the ones you need. Use WPA instead of WEP. Turn on MAC filtering. And make your computer needs passwords to access important folders. I only have WPA turned on, and to my knowledge no one has tried "hacking" into my stuff. -d |
Damn straight! I've more or less given up on tightening things up any more than they already are. At this moment there are two WEP networks and one open network around me. They make good targets for Skippy the hacker. If someone comes up with a way to turn down the output signal to my router, I'll worry about it then. ZM |