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The FON box arrived - we are foneros! March 30, 2006

Hey, what a day! After only 10 days or so the Linksys WRT54GL router arrived. We ordered it on the fon.com website for $25 plus shipping (a little over $30 total). That's about half the price of retail. The only catch is that you are obliged to run a FON hotspot for a year which is something you want to do anyways, right? So no problem here (you might want to check what your ISP says about sharing WiFi, though). See what's in the box here.

I am a Fonero finally Set-up and installation was a breeze. You can actually logon for a limited time as a registered fonero even without being an active fonero (you would be an Alien). Anyways, we wanted the more advanced firmware to play around with it and after all the good things we read about BrainSlayer and DD-WRT. So we downloaded the FONadvanced firmware from the homepage and flashed the software to the router. This is definitely not for everyone as there is no step by step guide. You actually follow the DD-WRT online guide but they speak about a bunch of different versions of firmware (with more or fewer features) but not about FONadvanced. This said, you may want to only do it you are sure dealing with a failed update. Refer to the forum above, there is a how-to-guide in case something went wrong.The new firmware is really super cool! We made a little experiment and walked all the way across our office (about 100 feet away from the router). There we placed a laptop and ran NetStumbler. We changed the routers output power from the default 28mW to 200mW (you can do even more) and almost doubled the signal strength. It's really great what you can do with the router running the FONadvanced software! More about our learnings to follow shortly but here is another short video.
Okreitz-FONRouterWhatsInTheBox467.jpg

Clip 1: Quicktime stream

Clip 2: Quicktime stream

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Comments»

1. gerhard - March 31, 2006

Hi,

very good site. I like it

but i cant open your videos in germany. any problems to be fixed?

I linked you

2. Per Hallgren - May 12, 2006

Hi

I have the same router but problems with range due to building structure. How do I increase output power?

3. admin - May 14, 2006

Per,

if you have the FONadvanced software on your router, there should be a setting for the output power. I don’t have access from where I am right now but you may also check out the DD-WRT site here.

Cheers……Olaf