Airport Admin rescan doesn't work?

Question

I have two iMacs (500Mhz/400Mhz), 10.4.3, Airport Admin (4.1.1), Snow ABS.
Every two or three days, I lose connection to the to the ABS(i.e. the w-network I set up). Airport Admin doesn't find it on a Rescan or Other, however I can still create a C2C network. An ABS power-on/off sometimes works, occasionally I have to do a hard reset/reload (yuk!).
I can't seem to find the cause.
What is strange is that the Airport Admin Rescan doesn't work on the 400Mhz iMac, but it does on the 500Mhz and the software is the same?
Help appreciated!

Answer 1

For the Airport Admin Utility "rescan" function to work, the Mac must have a fully functional connection with the Base Station. Performing a "rescan" should almost never be necessary in the first place, and it will only succeed if the underlying problem (eg a dropped wireless connection) gets fixed spontaneously before you click on the "rescan" button. In all likelihood, the "500MHz iMac" is able to successfully reconnect after a wireless connection failure (thus rescan eventually finds the Airport Base Station) whereas the "400MHz iMac" does not. Another possibility - the 400MHz iMac was never connected to your own Base Station in the first place, and instead was connected to the unprotected wireless network of one of your neighbors.
The real question in all this - why are your Macs losing their connection in the first place? The most common reason - radiofrequency interference from neighboring wireless networks or other devices (like portable phones and microwave ovens) that share use of the same 2.4GHz frequency. Sometimes this can be helped by changing the channel the Base Station transmits on to one that is less subject to interference (channel 1 or 11 are good choices to start with). The channel selection setting is found under the Airport tab of the Airport Admin Utility.