[kismac] Re: Signal strength

At 6:14 PM -0800 2006-02-27, John Warren wrote:

 I can also perform the same equipment tests if we want averaging of
 that equipment.  It may be best to try to scale everything to whatever
 the most common piece of hardware would be.  I don't know what most
 people use, but it may be the AE.

I don't think that this is a useful direction to pursue. An Apple Airport card in a PowerBook G3 "Pismo" is going to have a different signal strength pattern than a PowerBook G4 "TiBook", even though it's the same card -- the difference in the computer construction is enough to severely impact card performance. The same would be true for comparison with the AlBooks, and against the new MacBook Pros.

You'd have to know precisely which model of card was used in precisely which model of computer (there have been several generations of TiBooks alone, and the latest generations of AlBook had some pretty significant modifications over previous models), and you'd have to know precisely what device was being tested against, in precisely what kind of environment (i.e., is the wall 12" behind the sample transmitter or 16" behind, is the wall made of wallboard, plaster, or concrete, is the transmitter in a corner, how is the transmitter oriented, ad infinitum).


I'm sorry, there's just too many variables to try and control. In your testing, changing only the card used might result in a given pattern of relative strengths, but the results from someone else results might be totally different, even if they supposedly have the same sample transmitter, the same computer hardware, and are testing the same models of cards.

--
Brad Knowles, <brad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

    -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
    Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

 LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.

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