2 Blackbooks-different signal strength!

Hi there

Was sitting in a cafe in Chiangmai where i live. They have no internet but I get a signal from a nearby payable hotspot. Trouble is it's 1 or 2 so i never bothered subscribibg. My friend turned up yesterday and got strength 4. He had a blackbook same as me but much newer. Mine is from when they came out. His is new.
We looked at "about your mac" > airport card and found I had (0x168C, 0x86) whereas his was slightly different.....may have been 0x87 sorry can't quite remember.
My Wireless Card Firmware Version: 1.3.5.........his 1.3.4

Any explanations please it would be really useful to get connected there??

Thanx

I can't explain the differences between the two machines, however, I can tell you that signal strength can depend on your location. This is the case at my favorite café. They have (free) WIFI there however it is a fairly large building space and signal strength varies depending on when you are sitting in the café. And it doesn't matter how close you are to the router, either. In fact, the best location is about as far away from it (in the building) as you can get!

This is just one guess. Maybe they improved the antenna on the newer Macbooks. Either that or they are using a newer Airport card that gets better signal.

Are you both running the same version of OSX? All updates installed? That can make a difference also.

where you on battery vs him being plugged in? powersaving stuff there.

what are you basing signal strength on? the little menubar meter?

that has what, 3 bars? thats not very accurate

didnt the newer cards in them just get updated in june when they got wireless n capable? i think that might be the difference.

Thankyou for your comments

John MacGeek....same location
Travis7.......points taken and will check
kgeier82.....both battery and yes just menubar signal bars
kkelly122.....that's what I'm interested to know.

Any further suggestions very welcome
John

sleepyjohn said:

Thankyou for your comments

John MacGeek....same location
Travis7.......points taken and will check
kgeier82.....both battery and yes just menubar signal bars
kkelly122.....that's what I'm interested to know.

Any further suggestions very welcome
John

Click to expand...

i dont ever really trust that menubar signal meter. you need something more robust to actually compare the two, this i dont know what to suggest.

i did a little digging a while ago for widgets for wifi signal, some were ok, some were not.

its probably a hardware difference, and not much you can do about it.

this is what i use:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/airportradar.html

thankyou very much for the input....much appreciated....I'll try portradar

John