Apple Airport Extreme keeps dropping signal every minute or so

For the past year my airport has been dropping it's signal every 1 minute or so. Not completely dropping it, but going down to like 1mbps then going back up. So when playing games it'll drop out for a second, i will be frozen wherever I am in the game, yet i can still here other players talking and maybe see my health going down or something like that. I'm pretty close to the airport, and it does happen with all the computers in our household. How do I fix this? It's an older airport extreme, but it's driving me nuts.

 

What frequency does the router broadcast on? It's very likely that what's happening is that there's another radio source on the same, or a nearby, frequency, that intermittently broadcasts on a regular schedule, and when it broadcasts it's "stepping" on your own signal, and your router and your wireless NICs are probably interpreting that as another router/network using the same frequency, and stop broadcasting during the duration of that other signal - basically, the wi-fi protocol requires routers and clients to play nice, and not interrupt other speakers, so each unit checks first to see if someone else is broadcasting on the same frequency before that unit broadcasts its own signal, so if there's another radio source on the same or a nearby frequency that broadcasts a steady signal, the effect will be that none of your router or any of your NICs will broadcast during that time, and it will appear as if the data rate on your network has dropped to severly low levels.

One way to check for this is to use a utility like Netstumbler, which will be able to show you all/most of the radio signals in the vicinity of the system you're running it on, and that may give you a clue as to the source and frequency of any other radios that are "stepping" on your signal. Some other alternatives to Netstumbler can also be found here.

 

when i loaded up netstumbler, 2 wireless's showed up. One is mine, and one is someone elses on my street. It was doing this before they got it though...

 

Try modifying the beacon interval, if you have that option. Also enable RTS-CTS protection, and try short or long preamble.

 

How would I do that with an airport extreme? Any other suggestions to because I'm dying to fix this. What other options would help. Our setup at my house is the internet connection runs into our router or w/e which is a Motorola Sb5120 then that connects to the airport. I'm not sure what else to do... help please.