Weak Signal - How to reduce WiFi retries?

[whatsupskip]

I have a couple of ESP8266 in a location within the house that causing the UniFi WiFi access point to have many receive retries, 120 to 150 per five minutes. The signal strength for the ESP8266 as reported in UniFi controller is -78dB. Both are consistent through out a 24 hour period.

One of the ESP8266 is operating as an IR transmitter, so for the vast majority of the time it would be just sitting doing nothing. The other is similar as it is mains power switch.

I am wondering if there are any settings such as the transmit rate of the ESP8266 that could be changed to reduce the number of retries by the UniFi?

[TD-er]

You can set it to force B/G only.
This will gain you quite some extra sensitivity.