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First, the signal will fade out due to multipath effects (radio waves that bounce off objects and increase or decrease the signal that you receive).
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In practice, radio waves behave unpredictably in a number of ways. The signal level you receive in an unobstructed environment depends on the transmitter power, the gain of the two antennas involved, and the distance between them, as well as any loss between the antenna and the radio at each end. As I mentioned before, many manufacturers do not quote their receive sensitiviy for their adapters if you have one of these, I suggest picking a conservative figure such as -76dBm at 11 Mbps, which is the number for the Belkin F5D6020. Any less and it is likely to drop to one of the lower rates if you get as low as -94 dBm then the connection may drop altogether. In theory this means, in order to operate at 11 Mbps, this card must be consistently receiving a minimum signal level of -82 dBm. As an example, let us take the venerable ORiNOCO Gold 802.11b "Classic" card. Many manufacturers fail to publish this data, but those that do will generally rate their radios by dBm at various data rates. The most important is the receive sensitivity of your equipment. The answer is rather more complex than it ought to be, and depends on a huge number of factors. I get asked this question rather too often, so I'm posting my short answer here.