Cactus TurboNet Newsletter 11/1/06               

  Wireless tips

For the last few years, we’ve been selling increasing numbers of wireless routers for homes and businesses.  And we receive troubleshooting questions about them every day.  Here are some hints:

Wireless routers normally work on the 2.4 GHz radio band.  If you have 2.4 GHz telephones, they may interfere with your wireless router’s signal.  If they do, try changing the channel in your router to see if the interference can be bypassed.  When buying wireless phones, digital 900 MHz is probably the best type – the phones won’t interfere with your computers, and they work well over long distances.  We use digital 900 MHz cordless phones in our service department, and there are always over a dozen computers nearby, many without their interference-dampening cases on.  They work well.

Other sources of 2.4 GHz interference are microwave ovens, garage door openers, and other wireless routers in neighbors’ houses.  Radio signals are blocked by refrigerators and other metal objects,  cement (with its grid of reinforcing steel) and is severely degraded by tree leaves.  If you’re using your notebook on the deck, remember that wireless is also degraded by walls, but this can be severe or not, depending on what’s in the walls – foil-backed insulation is deadly to wireless signals, for instance.  Argon-filled windows, metal coatings on windows to cut down glare, and metal insect screens will also degrade or block a wireless signal.

  Web Email

   We’ve reached the season when people are sending more and more photos by email.  If you’re on a dial-up Internet connection, often these photos are so large that they tie up your email, blocking later emails from downloading into your computer.  You can retrieve and/or delete these large photos through the Web Email.  Go to http://mail.turbonet.com – the page will ask for your username (the first part of your email address) and password.  Once inside, you’ll be able to read your email, reply, see the photos, and delete any messages you don’t want in your regular email program.

  Kid-Safe (SPAM-less) email

   There’s a trick you can use to completely eliminate spam from your mailbox.  It is not suitable for business mailboxes, or other addresses which receive email from unexpected sources, but it works for children and many personal mailboxes, where the list of senders can be predicted.

   Log in to the Web email (see the article above) and go to Settings and Server Rules.  Add your family and friends’ email addresses to the White List, and as the last item in the list set it to reject all other email.  You can create this “reject all others” item as:

               Specified Header

               Contains String

               @

               Reject

This MUST be the last item in your white list, because the program processes the list in order.