The (in)famous Innacomm W3100 from TM, pretty basic stuff. From my experience, this unit works well. Its just that the UI is not very user friendly, especially with regards to port forwarding. As well as the UI access from WLAN, which is disabled. All these are okay still acceptable. The only thing I found dissatisfying was the WLAN connection drop probably due to blind spots that is caused by the structure of my house as well as the weak antenna. So the solution is to either change the unit or modify it.
Here's how I modded mine.
Find the original cable, which is the grey cable connected to the PCB to the bottom left of the capacitors, desolder that part. Then, get the RP-SMA cable, strip the outer jacket, and twist the conductors. Solder the conductors first so that it is easier to solder on the PCB later. Don't want to heat the PCB for too long.
Materials:
Antenna is 9dbi sourced from coolstore
RP-SMA female connector from ebay, for RM10 a piece.
Here is the innards of the modem
Here's the end result
Side view
From side view :
Top - Center core
Bottom - Metallic Shield
Subsequently, we need to attach the female RP-SMA connector to the device shell to mount the antenna. I used the solder pen to 'melt' a hole through the shell. This made my solder tip quite messy. A better idea is to drill a hole through the shell, but I do not have any drilling equipment.
After that, close the shell, mount the antenna and we are good to go.
Testing
I found that there was no much improvement in the signal strength with the 9dbi antenna at close range. At longer range, there was a slight improvement. The blindspots/wlan connection drop could not be observed thus far which is good. WLAN file transfers showed some improvements. Previously, file transfer speed was about 12Mbps at a certain location in my house, now it has improved to 16Mbps.
0 comments:
Post a Comment