Odd, continuously changing ESSID

Dear All,

Odd problem. Am in China, and bought a local DLink wireless router (DI-524m). Set it up with some difficulty (Chinese only, which I do not speak) for a WEP secured Wireless connection.

My AAO scanned for the wireless connection, but seemed to have problems finding the ESSID. After every scan it offered a different number of results to choose from, from 1 to 5, and all were garbled nonsense. The IDs were made with characters I have never seen before!

Thinking this must be my fault for buying a Chinese language router, I hauled out the Win XP laptop, which connected up with no issues, and identified the correct ID.

So not the router.

Any ideas? Here is an example "iwlist scan" (I am not very linux command-line savvy) showing the typical nonsense

---------------------------------------
ath0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:21:91:3C:930
ESSID:"
Mode:Master
Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
Quality=94/94 Signal level=-1 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm
Encryption keyn
Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s
36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=100
Extra:wme_ie=dd180050f2020101000003a4000027a4000042435e0062322f00
------------------------

Thanks,

Erskie

 

I had to remove the weird characters after "ESSID" above - they would not post!

 

I suspect it is showing you a some what different list each time as there are different ESSID's to choose from as people turn their systems on and off. So you will need to find which one is yours and use it. Maybe you could get a neighbor to tell you which one say what you want your ESSID to say so you will know which one to use. The other possibility is if choose a locked ESSID and use your WEP to unlock it and it works then you have the correct one, if not keep trying. I hope that helps.

 

Hi, Thank you for the ideas, but in this case I do not think that is the issue. I have the xp laptop running ,and it only sees the one router. And I cannot begin to describe the weird characters appearing on the AAO. I would not mind, but they keep changing so that I cannot even try to set up the link with the weird ID!

 

The radio in your AAO is probably stronger than what's in your laptop and is seeing local APs that your XP box doesn't see.

Cheers.

 

All good suggestions, but I had already proven that none of those were the problem.

In the end it was the WMM feature on the router - turning this on caused the AAO to see multiple oddly named sources. No idea why.

I had not noticed this because the Chinese router does not display in English, making setup very challenging.

Very odd, but there you go!

Thank you all for the advice.