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[the_jest]

Hi. I've had a DIR-825 B1 for several months, and have had problems with the 5GHz band constantly. There have been times when it is simply not visible to any clients, despite the fact that I am broadcasting the SSID of that band; when it has been seen, the connection would very frequently drop.

I recently tried the DD-WRT firmware, with similar results: the various status panels indicate that this band is enabled and active, but no clients can see it, and I can't connect to it, even with a laptop sitting right next to the device. This is with the N band as the only one in use, in 20/40 mode.

I'm not using any access restrictions, or advanced configurations of any sort. This has been very frustrating to me, as using the 5GHz band was the whole point of getting this router in the first place. Is there any way to test if this is some kind of hardware flakiness, or is there some setting I'm missing? Thanks.

[pcjunky]

Have you tried using inSSIDer from metageek.net to see what the 5 GHz signal is doing?

Also have you tried different channels?

What kind of 5 GHz devices or adapters do you have?

[FurryNutz]

How far away is the router from the connecting devices?
Any cordless house phones running the same Frequency by chance?

Any walls or obstructions between the router and devices?
The 5Ghz band is susceptible to obstructions and is bet in line of site. Happens over many routers running 5GHz band.

[the_jest]

I've tried a wide variety of things. I do have wireless phones in the house, but I unplugged all of them while testing this. I also brought the clients--two Lenovo ThinkPads, with Intel 5100 AGN and 5300 AGN cards--into the same room as the router. I've tried different channels.

DD-WRT thinks that the 5GHz band is up and running, and the router itself has the 5HGz icon aglow and flashing.

In the most recent round of testing, this band isn't showing up at all. I did try InSSIDer--very neat tool!--but it's not registering any activity on the band.

[pcjunky]

Either there's something wrong with the with the 5GHz band on the 825 or something wrong with the setup of your 5Ghz devices.

Is it possible to try a non-Intel 5GHz device or try connecting your laptop to a friend's dual band router?  You could even drive around running inSSIDer looking for 5GHz signals.


Or maybe uninstall the Intel drivers then shutdown and remove the intel adapter.  Boot up once without the intel adapter.  Shutdown and install the intel adapter.  Boot up and install the latest intel drivers.

[the_jest]

I've now done a lot more experimenting. First, I dropped DD-WRT and went back to the D-Link firmware, though upgraded to 2.05NA. With that, my computers did see the 5GHz band (both with the usual network utilities, and, with more details, inSSIDer), but were unable to connect to it. I then realized that I had a Mac with an 802.11n-compliant card, and lo and behold, it was able to associate right away.

I'm not sure what the problem could be with the Intel cards, which I can't remove from the laptops as they are internal. Will look into this as a probable cause for these issues, though I don't know what I can do about it. If that's the only problem, fixing it might fix everything--though since I've heard other reports of flakiness on the 5GHz band, maybe not. (Was that just with earlier firmware? How stable is it with the latest release?)

Thanks for the suggestions.

[FurryNutz]

Have you set the router to Single mode G and N at 2.4Ghz to see if your LTs will connect on that mode to test?

Seems like if the Mac can connect on N and probably G, something isn't right on the LT's. Drivers up to date?

[the_jest]

Oh, there's never been a problem on the 2.4GHz band; it connects to G no problem.

But I did use your idea as a suggestion for another test, and I set the 5GHz band to "A only," and the laptops connected to that right away. As did the Mac. (At lower speeds than N, of course, but still....)

So there must be some issue with the drivers for my laptop, and how they handle 802.11n on the 5GHz band. I will explore this separately, but for the moment it seems that the D-Link is not the problem, so if I can't figure it out myself, I'll move over to a more appropriate forum.

Thanks again.

[FurryNutz]

need to make sure the LT's wireless support the 5Ghz band. I presume they do?

[cldriver]

What is the channel being used by the 5ghz band? in the 149 -161 range?

Try this, setup the dir-825 with
 
1) a manually selected channel in the range of  36 - 48 from the dropdown menu.
2) Disable wirless protected setup. (its in the advanced tab, wi-fi protected setup)

I had problems with my laptop(intel 4965agn wireless card) seeing the 5ghz band from the router until I made the above changes.

[zgates420]

I had this problem too, my DAP-1522 is unable to see my 5ghz band under site survey.  Since I knew my dir 825 was broadcasting a 5ghz band, I simply typed the name of the SSID in instead of doing a site survey and it connected fine.