Hi, if I am understanding it correctly, you have multiple wifi connections
above and beyond the WISP?
>The Linksys wireless router is there.
>I have one of the antenna leads connected to a directional flat wall
>antennae on the outside wall that points straight to the shop. The shop is
>160' feet away, a metal, well insulated pole building. My wireless signal
>out there was great with the side door open, but as Wisconsin winter
>approaches, I added a Linksys range extender in between the house and the
>shop.
As was pointed out earlier, you may need to try to isolate where the problem
is. A problem you could easily be having, is called desense. It means the
close proximity to a similar radio can reduce the receiving sensitivity of
another one. 801.11b is split up into 11 channels, but they actually overlap
very heavily. only 1, 6 and 11 are truly 'apart from each other'. Try
putting your local wifi channels as far away from your WISP's channel as
possible. Consumer wifi gear is much more prone to this than many WISP's
radios.
There are some great wifi/network monitoring tools in the live CD, Knoppix.
If you're not familiar with it, it's a bootable CD that temporarily installs
Linux into RAM, doesn't touch your hard drive. Depending on what wifi NIC's
you are using, it could range from trivial to impossible to get configured.
Prism2 cards (common as dirt), Lucent/Orinoco, Atheros and many will work
well (the chipset is what's important, not the manufacturer).
Kwifimanager <http://kwifimanager.sourceforge.net/binaries/screenshot.png>is
a nice general GUI monitor that shows speed and general signal
strength.
It would be enough to show drastic signal loss.
Wavemon<http://www.pclinuxonline.com/wiki/advancedrf>is a very good
wifi monitor, it has a simple interface, but will show you in
greater detail noise vs. signal levels.
Iptraf <http://cebu.mozcom.com/riker/iptraf/shots/iptraf-dstat1.gif> is
another simple but powerful monitor, that measures just plain packets
moving. It will show current, average and volume totals for any interface
(wired or wifi) that you point it to. You can generate some heavy traffic by
FTPing a large file, either to an FTP server not too many hops from you,
and/or a local server on your network (to measure internal bandwidth).
Since you have ruled out a lot of local interference (phones/microwave), it
is looking like either signal quality or signal strength at this point. The
above-mentioned tools are all (legally) free <http://knoppix.net/>, and can
be a valuable addition to troubleshooting a connection. You will probably
need to get your wireless NICs properly associated with your AP's for this
to work, so investigate the menu choices, or run netcardconfig from a root
prompt. You will need to provide ESSID, channel, netmask, gateway, DNS, etc.
For testing, it may be easier to turn off WEP/WPA encryption.
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