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Everything Else => General Support and Discussion => Zaurus General Forums => Archived Forums => Security and Networking => Topic started by: kutscher on February 19, 2004, 03:53:13 pm

Title: WIFI Signal Power.
Post by: kutscher on February 19, 2004, 03:53:13 pm

Hi all,

I just got my Symbol Spectrum24 Wifi.
The card is extremely fast, however, besides some posts claiming that it has low power consumption, I\'ve found that it is a battery eater!

Anyone knows how to tweak the card so we could reduce db/mw, eventually loosing some speed?

Tks

Title: WIFI Signal Power.
Post by: Mickeyl on February 20, 2004, 04:55:41 am

If you think, the Symbol Spectrum 24 is a battery eater, than try one of the other cards...

Title: WIFI Signal Power.
Post by: kutscher on February 20, 2004, 08:34:17 am

Yeah, you are right. I tried a LinkSys with horribles results though.

But if I\'m not wrong, the signal power floats from 100mW to 500mW - I wonder if we could arbitraly set a value so the battery could last longer.

I\'m used to have my Z connected thru gprs at only 56Kbps so there is no need at all for me to have 11Mbps. 2Mbps would be more than enough.

Any clues?
Tks!
_CK

Title: WIFI Signal Power.
Post by: Connor Angel on April 05, 2006, 01:59:08 pm

Quote

Yeah, you are right. I tried a LinkSys with horribles results though.

But if I'm not wrong, the signal power floats from 100mW to 500mW - I wonder if we could arbitraly set a value so the battery could last longer.

I'm used to have my Z connected thru gprs at only 56Kbps so there is no need at all for me to have 11Mbps. 2Mbps would be more than enough.

Any clues?
Tks!
_CK
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Looking through some old posts, and I have wondered the same thing. I attempted playing with iwconfig settings before, but half-assed because I don't know much about wifi. Does anyone know if you can force a wifi card to drop down to 2mbps to preserve power, or am I not seeing things the way they really work? I could see maybe that the 2mbps is more of a noise reduction thing and power depends more on distance, but I don't know. Can anyone provide even a firm no to this question, if not a yes?

Title: WIFI Signal Power.
Post by: bluedevils on April 05, 2006, 02:05:42 pm

The socket/symbol cards are low powered mainly for its idle power usage.  Last I remember the zaurus drivers for the sockets do not lower the idle power like the windows drivers do.  Still, the card is less power hungry than my former netgear card.

Title: WIFI Signal Power.
Post by: Drake01 on April 05, 2006, 09:43:10 pm

Quote

The socket/symbol cards are low powered mainly for its idle power usage.  Last I remember the zaurus drivers for the sockets do not lower the idle power like the windows drivers do.  Still, the card is less power hungry than my former netgear card.
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The Symbol does have power conserving features available, which is why I bought this card to use with my old HandEra (Palm OS) PDA.  The PDA had an optimized driver for the Symbol and I seemed to get reasonable battery time out of it.  I don't know if it was strictly for idle time or how it worked.  I do know that there was a slider for power saving, which had about a half-dozen increments.

The Z driver may not take advantage of the power saving features, but they are available if someone were to write a driver for them.