Where to Position Router for Best Performance.

[Poseidon]

I have my RT-N66R router sitting on a small table near the center of my living room. However I'm not sure what is the best position to face the router to get best WiFi performance.

Should the front of the router face out towards the living room.....or should it face the wall (with the back of the router facing the living room)......or should I have it facing sideways toward the hall and the bedrooms?

I live in a one story apartment BTW.

Experts, please chime in. Thanks.

 

[RMerlin]

The router position doesn't matter - it's the antennas that does. If the room is pretty much at the center of the apartment, then have the side antennas extended toward opposite directions to point at both ends of the appartment at about 45 degrees, and keep the central one standing, maybe leaning backward if you need to cover a room in that direction as well.

On a single-floor apartment tho it probably won't make any big difference, unless you have the router at the extreme end of the apartment, and are having issues covering the other end. Just put them in slightly different positions to increase the chance of covering all reaches of the apartment.

 

[sm00thpapa]

Place it in the center of the home at least 4 feet off the ground. Signals drop not rise. That's why antennas are always on mountains. I did a test and my signal to my laptop had a better signal when I held it directly under the router versus over the router. There was a huge difference using inssider. Hope this helps.

 

[msb]

... Signals drop not rise. That's why antennas are always on mountains.....

Antenna's are placed at high elevations because certain frequencies propagate line of sight and the elevation provides a direct path with less ground level obstruction. The beam tilt is dependent upon the design and positioning of the antenna. The strongest radiated signal will drop, rise or go in whatever direction the antenna design and positioning dictate.

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
So it means router not necessarily should be located in the center of room. What I do is I move around router to give best signal to most important device(my wife's real time video streaming home theater). Once router location is found I put it there with marking on the desk. Moving it a foot or two will change the signal level(think wave length on 2.4 and 5GHz frequency, very small change in router location matters). Then tweak the antenna for some more improvement. Generally thought the higher antenna the better is true but not always. I am telling this from actual professional field experiences for many years all over the world. Antenna engineering is still lot to do with experiments like acoustic engineering in HiFi audio speakers, speaker enclosures. You build some according to the calculations based on theory 100% and when try the result the speaker does not sound good, the antenna does not perform as expected. It needs endless effort to make it good.

 

[RMerlin]

Antenna's are placed at high elevations because certain frequencies propagate line of sight and the elevation provides a direct path with less ground level obstruction. The beam tilt is dependent upon the design and positioning of the antenna. The strongest radiated signal will drop, rise or go in whatever direction the antenna design and positioning dictate.

What the man says. Radio signals don't have mass, so they don't rise or drop - they travel in straight line, until they hit an obstacle, which can either absorb or reflect the signal. It's radiated just like a lightbulb.

That's also why when determining the optimal location for a router you should picture an imaginary straight line from the router's antenna to where your client device(s) will be, and see what kind of obstacles it has to go through. Going through a wall at an angle will also reduce the signal more than if it hits it at 90 degrees - more surface to travel through.

 

[RogerSC]

As an example, we have a house that's more than twice as long as wide. My router is in one end of the house, and my living room is at the other end of the house. So, for wireless, I'm trying to cover my whole house, but have the best signal in the living room that I can. So the router body is aimed at the living room (as RMerlin says, imagining a straight line perpendicular to the router broadside to the main couch in the living room *smile*, that's how the router is aimed). Then the antennas are adjusted for the best signal (which happens to be with the center one vertical, and the two outer ones at a 45 degree angle from the center one.

I arrived at this by experimenting for some time with various wireless devices (laptop running inSSIDer, android phone using Network Analyzer, comparative strength as shown on Roku, etc.). So ended up with a great signal in my living room, and cover the rest of the house well.

Works well for me, took some time playing around with various router and antenna orientations.

 

[Poseidon]

So I finally moved the router to the center of my living room (previous location was towards end/corner). The reason for doing this is to improve my 5GHz signal in my master bedroom.

Using WiFi Analyzer app (Android), it shows that the 5GHz is around -55 dBm in the bedroom - that's about 15 feet away from the router (but there are 2 walls in-between the router and the bedroom).

Is that a good number?

 

[RogerSC]

So I finally moved the router to the center of my living room (previous location was towards end/corner). The reason for doing this is to improve my 5GHz signal in my master bedroom.

Using WiFi Analyzer app (Android), it shows that the 5GHz is around -55 dBm in the bedroom - that's about 15 feet away from the router (but there are 2 walls in-between the router and the bedroom).

Is that a good number?

Sounds good, but the real test is if you're getting the throughput that you need to get. So if you can do what you need with 5GHz., then it's just fine.

 

[sm00thpapa]

The higher the router the better the signal this has been proven many times.

 

[Poseidon]

Didn't want to start a new thread, so I'll just post it here. Previously my modem and router were located right near my PC - so I always had my connection wired via Ethernet cable from the N66U.

Now that I moved the router 20 feet or so away, I'm using a 2.4GHz wiFi connection. Everything is working just fine except that when my hard drive goes to "sleep" (set for 30 mins of inactivity)....it's turning off the WiFi connection.

When it wakes up, it takes about 1 min to re-establish the WiFi connection.

Is there a way to set the WiFi connection to stay on ALWAYS?

 

[RMerlin]

Didn't want to start a new thread, so I'll just post it here. Previously my modem and router were located right near my PC - so I always had my connection wired via Ethernet cable from the N66U.

Now that I moved the router 20 feet or so away, I'm using a 2.4GHz wiFi connection. Everything is working just fine except that when my hard drive goes to "sleep" (set for 30 mins of inactivity)....it's turning off the WiFi connection.

When it wakes up, it takes about 1 min to re-establish the WiFi connection.

Is there a way to set the WiFi connection to stay on ALWAYS?

Is it just the hard drive, or the whole computer that goes into sleep? Cause if it's the computer, there's not much you can do about it. Sleep mode shuts down pretty much everything except for a few basic things, such as the CPU still running in a low power state. The computer cannot maintain an active network connection while in this low-power state.