Thread: wifi signal loss?

hey i know this is kinda out of your guys field of study but its physics so you cover just about everything. anyways my question is why is it during the day i get a great signal from my router but at night i get 1 maybe two bars of signal from my router? to me i thought i would get bad reception during the day due to microwaves of solar radiation from the sun. so im curious why is it at night i get such a bad signal from my router?

I don't have any idea. I doubt it is something like solar radiation. After all, tjhat would affect everyone and the system would have been designed to cope.

Maybe interference from other people nearby who come home and turn on their routers in the evening? Or other electrical equipment?

You could try changing the channel your router uses and see if that helps. You can get apps for your phone (or PC) that will tell you what other signals there are and what channels they use.

Two suggestions that might help:

• Move your router to a different part of the room / house.
• Try connecting to your router with a different device (e.g. smart phone / laptop / another PC) and check it is also getting a poor signal.

That's a good point: do you normally sit in a different place during the day than in the evening?

This is definitely a case of Wifi gremlins. They come out only at night and feed on the wifi signal. If you want to get rid of them, you'll need to wear underpants on your head in public.

The underpants thing only works for gnomes, not gremlins, surely...

Originally Posted by MacGyver1968

This is definitely a case of Wifi gremlins. They come out only at night and feed on the wifi signal. If you want to get rid of them, you'll need to wear underpants on your head in public.

I just do that all the time for the hell of it.

Originally Posted by vegitofrieza

hey i know this is kinda out of your guys field of study but its physics so you cover just about everything. anyways my question is why is it during the day i get a great signal from my router but at night i get 1 maybe two bars of signal from my router? to me i thought i would get bad reception during the day due to microwaves of solar radiation from the sun. so im curious why is it at night i get such a bad signal from my router?

As Strange has said, it's not microwaves from the sun. The most likely explanation is that the interference environment changes throughout the day (e.g., your neighbors are starting all their torrent downloads in the evening, or are engaging in extended conversations over their 2.4GHz cordless telephones), or that you are positioning yourself differently at night than during the day. Try moving things around (re-aiming antennas, moving the router). If interference is the problem, move to a different channel.

Good luck!

In the early days of the "wireless" we had this same problem, eventually governments regulated against it. But not well enough, so individuals began to interconnect their wirelesses with... wires. Communal antennas. The birth of cable.