For any of you that have Rio Receivers with a wireless 802.11b link to your files, what is the range you seem to be getting whereby you experience little or no dropouts in sound during playback with 320kbps files or larger (CD quality wav, etc.)?

Tricky to measure distance, but wireless access point is upstairs at one end of the 5 bedroom house, Rio is downstairs at other end of the house. MP3's are VBR at highest rate available with LAME / Audiograber. When I first start up a playlist I get some dropout for a few ( 15 ) seconds but then things settle down and work just fine. I assumed its the 80gig IDE drive spinning up when its first accessed.

I didn't know the Receiver could even play WAV files.

That is pretty interesting! I was planning to switch my Rios to wireless and installed a WiFi network. For starters, I'm using a Siemens wireless DSL Router and a D-Link PC Card in my notebook. I am absolutely dismayed at the reception I am getting! I have a similar setup - access point is upstairs one end of the house. Same floor, two rooms further down the hall I am down to minimum reception already. Downstairs living room (probably 45 feet) I get minimum connection and connection drop outs. On the deck (65 feet max) I don't get any reception anymore! Am I doing something wrong (and is this the wrong forum to discuss this I wonder)... The way things look, I haven't bought another access point for my RIOs yet, since it didnt seem to make much sense if I'm not getting good coverage. The only place I get good reception is in the same room (excellent to good reception, about 10 feet away).

thats indeed very odd, 802,11b kit should do better than that. Maybe you have something causing a problem with range. IIRC I read something about DECT phones and 802.11b a while back. Or maybe you have faulty kit ? I'm NOT using mine with add on antennas which I know you can get to extend the range, and am getting good coverage ( 11mbit ) around the house.

Projects like this :

http://www.communitywireless.org

http://www.locustworld.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album02&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_album.php

Are planning on using 802.11b between houses !

As a quick update, I changed my wireless PC Card from D-Link to an Orinoco Gold card and reception improved in leaps just from that (no change to my Access point!). I would never have thought how much difference that hardware can make. Now I am considering wireless for the Rio again.

Effective range varies from house to house with 802.11b. I first noticed the problem at my parent's house which was built around 1911. Plaster walls seems to be a big problem. The plaster is applied to a heavy wire mesh that is an excellent barrier for 2.4 ghz traffic. Spread spectrum phones wipe out my x10 video sender, so they may interfere with 802.11b (I'm just guessing). 802.11b also interferes with the x10, but not on all channels.

Having the access point on the same floor as the remote connections seems to help. Having it in an unobstructed location also improves performance.

All in all, my experience has been poor, but it beats wires!

Greg

It depends on what you have too..

I used to use an apple airport base (I'm running windows) - this setup worked awesome for 2+ years, until the airport died (it refused to initialize properly...) I replaced it with a linksys, then a belkin bases - both of these weren't nearly as reliable/fast as the apple base station was.
-mark

The apple airport dying is a standard problem - it can usually be fixed by replacing a capacitor. Don't have the web page handy right now, but googling around should find it.