getting a strong signal in my basement

Hello,

On the second floor of my house, front side of the house I have a Linksys WRT54GL connected to Time Warner cable. The Linksys ws upgraded to the Tomato 1.19 firmware and I took of the original 2db antennas and replaced them with 9 dbi antennas facing downward. I set the transmission strength to 69 in as much as MaximumPc stated the highest one should go is 70 or it will heat up the components.

When I am upstairs, my download speed is around 6-700 Kb/sec. I would like to get the signal down to my basement because my basement is air conditioned and upstairs isnt. I have experimented with my laptop wireless built in adapter and it picks up a signal of
36 mbps according to Netstumbler and the speed varies between 138 kb/sec to 220 kb/sec. If I disable the Atheros wireless adapter in my laptop and connect the Wi-Fire I get 188-192 KB/sec and the range is very tight as you can see. I have to play around with positioning but that seems to be what I get. They state that I am getting 36-48 mbits/sec speed. I disconnected my wiFire unit.

I once bought a cantenna that supposedly is rated at 12 dbi but I have no way to test it. I connected the cantenna to my Engenius EUB-362 EXT unit and then to my laptop and their connection screen showed a strength of 21-26 db. It vaired the speed from 178-273 kb/sec and this range is all over the lot.


I would like to get up in the range of 500 kb/sec down in my basement. A friend of mine says he will loan me his 14 or 16 dbi yagi in a few weeks but the summer is stillhere. I saw a cheap deal on a Netgear Wireless Powerline adapters and I bought two of them and unfortunately they contribute nothing to increasing my signal strength other than what I am doing now so i will probably return them next week. It stated that it was also a range extender but I question it because my laptop was right their unit and with it on or off I got the same results.

Are there any changes in the Tomato software other than what I did that will improve the Linksys sending out a stronger signal that I could get down to my basement ?

Thanks