I have this WiFi adapter. It works fine but I’ve notice that it losses connectivity to my home network sporadically for couple minutes and then it is back. At the beginning I thought it was my WAP or ISP so installed so monitoring tools on my network and all seem right and I see the outages to my Kodi (Raspberry PI Model B) in the graph couple times during the day. I searched other forums for Raspberry PI and they say that it has been fixed the issue running sudo apt-get install ralink-firmware but when I run it I get the error " Unable to locate package ralink-firmware". I’m not very familiar with this operating system so not sure what am I missing or if anybody else has the same problem and how they have fixed it.
The adapter usually losses connectivity when I’m streaming so sometimes it breaks the connection and other times it recovers.
Thx Sam, not following you on the statement if it is working already then the firmware is included. Yes the wireless car works with intermittent problems. Not sure if the latest firmware is included.
In regards to the logs please let me know what you need and how to do it and I will be happy to share them.
Have you done any normal wifi troubleshooting yet ?
Not all wifi problems automatically mean there is a problem with the software or wifi adaptor…
Have you tried running a wifi scanner to see what other AP’s are on what channels in your area ? Have you tried different using different channels to try to avoid interference from other AP’s or non wifi devices ?
How far and through how many walls are you trying to connect ? Is it a thumb size adaptor or one of the tiny micro ones that only sticks out a few millimetres ? (which have very small antennas and poor range/performance)
IMHO the Ralink rt5370 is a fairly low performance budget chipset - I have 4 different wireless adaptors with different chipsets including one using the same Ralink rt5370 chipset as yours, and the Ralink adaptor is by far the worst performing of the 4 adaptors I have. (It was also the cheapest one I bought, so fair enough I suppose - you get what you pay for with wireless adaptors)
Yes I have checked my access point as I though it was the problem but none of my other network devices looses connectivity sporadically like my OSMC box. I thought it was my ISP as well as I usually notice this at night when I’m streaming some video but with the monitoring application that I have in my home network there are no outages to the ISP or any other devices.
I understand that also could be the video service provider which we have no control from but seeing on the graph the outages that happen during the day for the OSCM box is what trigger me to open this case.
Yes it is a thumb size adapter. I have a blue ray player with wireless connector at the same place (next to each other) and I don’t see the same issue. I have tried different channels as well and I see the same issue.
So from the network point of view yes I have done some troubleshooting. From the driver/software/settings on the adapter I have not done any troubleshooting as I’m not familiar how to troubleshoot this from the OSMC box.
I agree the adapter is cheap, it came as part of a kit that I bought and maybe there is no much to do but wanted to check if maybe somebody else experiences the same problem.
Today I put a USB cable to extend the dongle of the adapter to see if that helps to get better signal. In the last two hours I have not received any disconnects but I still see packet loss sporadically within the two hours even though the box is idle. Maybe that is the issue, the adapter has low power and cheap.
Happy to report that since I added a cable to connect the dongle to the Raspberry I don’t see more disconnects. I still see small packet loss during the day.
I hope this helps to others having the same problem.