Hello,
I recently moved from Linksys WRT54G to Asus WL500-Gp because of more ram/flash and USB ports. Everthing works fine, except Wireless. The signal is weak, even very close to the router the signal is not full.

I tried to use netstumbler to compare the signal from asus and from linksys, the difference is not much but outside the room where the router is located I cannot connect, with the linksys I can connect 20 meter far and with a wall between.

I tried to increase power to 80mW but nothing change.

I already tried to dismount the asus to check if the antenna is connected to the mini-pci board and it is.

Any suggestion? is it possible to replace the mini-pci card with the linksys one? If possible, I have just to replace or I have to do something to let it work?

Thanks in advance.

WL500Gp signal

WRT54G signal

I got the same with all of my wl-500gP. The problem is known and PROBABLY it is the BCM4318 wlan chip and wl driver incompatibility resulting in poor sensitivity. the wl driver is old and not fully support new braodcom chips.
You should swap this wlan module to some with Atheros chipset based and use madwifi driver. You can even put some high power cards if you want to use you asus as outdoor AP which coverage large area (I use Ubiquiti SR2 400mW and XR2 600mW output power)

Is it possible to use the minipci card from Linksys WRT54G V1 ? (BCM2050 I suppose)

I think it is possible if you have spear one.
You can try also kamikaze-2.4 with oryginal asus wlan card - it has newer wlan driver and maybe some optimizations.

Yes I have two WRT54G, one is ver. 1 with minipci wireless card. What I have to do after changing the wireless card? changing drivers? how to do that?

If first step doesn't work I'll try with kamikaze-2.4, thanks.

if you use wrt54gv1 wlan card the standard WR driver should by sufficient, you can install 'wl' for radio parameters managment and nad 'nas' if you want to use wpa/wpa2 encryption.
With kamikaze 2.4 (NOT 2.6! - the driver doesnt work under 2.6 yet) the wlan is disabled by default. you have to configure /etc/config/wireless file. read the wiki.

Hi,

I don't have an atheros miniPCI card but I do have an Intel 2100 miniPCI card, and there are drivers for it. How can I make it work better than the original Broadcom?

it's simple - install kamikaze-2.6  7.06 then install kmod-net-ipw2100 and then configure /etc/config/wireless

how to upgrade to Kamikaze?

cd /tmp
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/7.06/brcm-2.4/openwrt-brcm-2.4-squashfs.trx
mtd -e linux -r write openwrt-brcm-2.4-squashfs.trx linux

Is that correct?