Curious WiFi Speeds

Having had a BT Home Hub 3 Type A for about a week now and having no problems with my Pansonic Wireless HD Recorder, I bought a WiFi dongle, RA Link 300 mbps.

When I first connect the dongle on my computer which is 1 foot away from the hub it wont connect faster than 54 mbps. The hub also reports this speed in the even log. If I use the RA Config utility to switch off and on the RF signal I can get faster speeds, eg 130 up 130 down. I presume this is near the maximum speeds but why doesnt it connect at the fastest speed initially? Dodgy hub, dongle or software. It appears to connect at g speeds yet the hub is set to n only 40 mhz. Any ideas? OS is XP SP3.

Edit: After running a while it went to 144/1 mbps so reconnected and got 144/130 mbps, wonder if the dongle and hub are too close together?

Edited by Banger (Thu 10-Jan-13 22:28:23)

try it in a different room or round a corner, may allow the MIMO stuff to do something it can't do when they're adjacent.

Thanks for the tip.

I notice after using Inssider and the RALinks own diagnostics that the dongle is transmitting at a steady 144 mbps whereas the receive goes down to 1 mbps at times which Im assuming is from the BT Home Hub. Looking at the dBm output of both signals the Hub one seems to vary quite alot but the dongle is steady to be expected I suppose.

I have noticed though as soon as I start pulling data through the hub on the receive channel it shoots up to 130 mbps for example if I do a speed test and start pulling down 17 mbps on the ADSL line. Anyone know if the Hub has a wireless power save? Its set to smart wireless but I thought that was just S/N analysis on each channel.