Sierra 595 aircard

[oldstyle]

This is my first post to this forum and look forward to being a regular visitor. I have the Sierra 595 usb aircard and am generally very happy with it. I live in rural Alberta, Canada and regular internet is not an option here. Problem is, I'll be playing poker and just get disconnected, very annoying. I have changed PC's, updated everything and am convinced the problem lies with the aircard. I have a Wilson trucker antenna mounted on the roof and have recently purchased another antenna from Australia that is supposed to be the perfect match for the aircard, hasn't arrived yet. Am I doing something wrong with networking or what?
Thanks

[johnwill]

Cellular communications are not that reliable, it doesn't surprise me much that you occasionally get dropouts. I doubt there's a perfect solution to this issue.

[oldstyle]

OK , I'm learning slowly. My new antenna came today but I need more cable to get it to the roof, so as I make changes I will need to know how they affect signal strength. I have discovered the hyper terminal and am trying to get it to work. The antenna I had on the roof was mounted on an angle and I leveled it, this seems to have helped but again I want to see how any changes affect the outcome

[oldstyle]

I have read every tutorial I can find on hyperterminal but can't get it to work. I can get to the screen but it won't accept commands. Any suggestions?

[johnwill]

Does the modem you use map to a COM port? If not, I don't know that you can use HyperTerminal.

[oldstyle]

Ok so I probably can't use hyperterminal, I've mounted the 11db antenna on the roof. I have a tv antenna that rises an additional 25' can I add another 25' to the 10' of antenna lead that is on the antenna? Is there a cheap device that I can purchase to measure signal strength? I have no professional experience in this field but don't mind messing around

[johnwill]

Actually, if you start adding a lot of wire to the antenna, you'll lose any benefit of the antenna due to losses in the antenna cable. You might try something like this Hawking [HSB2] Hi-Gain WiFi Signal Booster in conjunction with the hi-gain antenna.

[oldstyle]

Just a followup, I have found a site where you can measure connection speeds, www.speedtest.net This allows me to monitor changes to antenna configurations etc. I can download at 2100 kilobites, the aircard is supposed to be capable of a speed of 3100 so I have purchased a wilson dual band booster, I suspect this will achieve the desired result but I still had the problem of dropped signal. Turns out if you run the watcher program from Sierra in "evdo only" then it doesn't try to jump back and forth from evdo to 1x and cause problems. Next I noticed that from reinstalling watcher several times that it created many com port connections, so I deleted most of them. I am left with com 1 & 2 in use, 3 is printer and the aircard assigned to 2, 8 & 10. Not sure how to handle these but the conflicts have pretty much stopped and surfing is good. Hope this may help someone. I run across a lot of ppl who have the same problems that I had and they are very frustrated as I was
Thanks

[johnwill]

Interesting. I've had no experience with wireless ISP's, so this is all new information for me.