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Have you ever tried to establish a long distance WiFi link using Dlink's DWL-2100 with external outdoor antennas? Long distance antenna alignment / aiming seems to be easy to handle for distances up to two kilometres but longer links may require very sharp eyes or a kind of antenna alignment tool.
Unfortunately the beloved DWL-2100 requires two people for antenna alignment. The first one should be up in the mast in order to align the antenna and the second must repeatedly type “get sta” in two telnet windows (one for client and the other for the access point).
An antenna alignment tool is an idea that I carry in my mind since 2005 for my WiFi in Chios (Greek Island) but it came true after a large WiFi installation in Santorini (Greek Island). It is difficult indeed to align 11 grid antennas within an area of 9 square kilometers.
So in about 10 hours of continuous programming in VB.Net I managed to create an antenna alignment utility for DWL-2100. This utility consists of two threaded telnet clients, some regular expressions to select the useful data out of the telnet strings, a ZedGraph charting window and a speech API. 
Using the program is really easy. You have to complete the Wireless Client and Access Point IP addresses or hostnames and passwords and then click on the “Connect and send commands” button. The utility will display Client MAC Address, System Name, Data Rate, Received Signal Strength and Acknowledge Signal Strength. If the Client is connected to the Access Point, a second telnet session will bring and display Access Point MAC Address, System Name, Data Rate, Received Signal Strength and Acknowledge Signal. Plus you can graph signal strengths of all clients connected to the Access Point. The main feature is the speech that brings you voice readings for the signal strengths like having another person in the ground doing the signal readings.
So just put the client antenna in a guess direction, connect your laptop, power up and setup the client and run the antenna align utility in order to fine tune the link.
Download DAntenna:
 
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15/5/2010webmst@libero.it
Dear Michael,
I've tried your antenna alignment software, using it some DWL-2100AP units running original DLINK firmware 2.50eu.
I've experienced some problems, such as:
- signals reported on middle-left ("client" side) is not extracted correctly from the "get status" output, as the program displays "receive signal " and "ack signal" instead of their numeric values;
- client rate reported on top-left is not reported after the MAC address (it still shows "Client rate")
- the graph shows just one couple of data, the "access point" data, while "client" data is not shown
- sometimes, "access point" data logging (lower box) stops working and the program aborts (I think this is due to a problem in sending/parsing the commands/responses that generates runtime errors)
- sometimes, the "stop checking" button does not work, so you have to terminate the program via the task manager
- the program form is still resizable dragging the lower right corner with the mouse (set the VB form property to disable it)
Then, I would suggest the following improvements:
- last used IP addresses and password to be stored, so the are quickly recalled next time when the program is run
- password characters converted in "*", one after the other, as they are typed, to preserve security
I hope you appreciate my suggestions.
Best regards,
Alberto Mensi
Alessandria, Italy
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