Since I am in hospital again, I have to used unwired to get online.
Now at the best of times, unwired is pretty dodgy in terms of reception where RPA is located, so I am constantly doing the unwired-dance of trying to locate the mystical "sweet spot" in and around my ward, whatever it happens to be.
I have discovered recently a little trick to improving a otherwise bad reception (say, 2-3 red bars of signal quality in Navini Diagnostics) - a low grade constant data stream!
I stumbled up on this when I was downloading a large'ish file using wget at a whopping 1Kb/s, and have managed to duplicate it by pinging www.unwired.com.au with an interval of 0.2 seconds.
As long as the ping is running the background, my signal quality is in the yellow mostly and ssh is fairly responsive. Other online activities such as IM and normal www do not seem to be any slower than usual.
Cheers,
Steve