• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Extending signal range

Y

yfel

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 2, 2008
Messages
130
I finally caved and gave up what was my office/den room to one of my kids as they are getting a bit old to share a room without excessive amounts of drama. I am sad to lose my space, but I still have the garage I guess =/

Anyway, I've been very happily using a WRT54GL to route internet all over the house, and as the room is right in the middle of the house, it was working beautifully for all my pcs and laptops in every other room. Now I've moved my pc to the bedroom, and another to my dining room along opposing exterior walls, about as far apart as you could possibly get them without setting them up on the lawn. The pc in the bedroom is with the modem and router and it's connected via cat5, the one in the dining room is struggling to maintain a connection.

I've seen that I could use another WRT54GL as a repeater, but I really have no idea how to go about this. I haven't flashed the one I have now at all, I just plugged it in and setup the WEP. If I grab another would this be a fairly simple project? I haven't wanted to flash the router as it's been working great with stock firmware up to this point and I didn't want to risk screwing it up.
 
Would that actually solve the problem? I've seen a couple cheap one's but many are just as expensive if not more than getting another router. What's the best solution?
 
best? IMHO honestly is a good high gain antenna. An "extender" can extend your network, but to do it with the linksys you'll need to flash tomato or DD-WRT onto it. It will do the trick, but If the pc IS able to get a connection every once in a while, just adding some higher gain antennas on both ends is a far simpiler solution. Furthermore with an extender you're wireless network speeds will be reduced because only one device can talk at a time. This included the repeater. Its just going to rebroadcast everything it recieves. (Think of the air in your wireless network as a network HUB.), if you try to tranfser any decent amount of files between the dining room PC and the bedroom PC, it will be horribly slow.

While you're at it I'd recommend switching to WPA. A wep eky can be cracking in under 15 minutes by a complete novice. Theres even videos on youtube that explain it step by step.

The best solution is relative. an alternative is to use another linksys router and use it as a wireless BRIDGE. That would make things alot simpiler for you and you wont need bigger antennas if the routers can see each other.
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Bridge

If it were me however. I'd just use the antenna. But then again I try to keep as much of my networking equipment in my rack as possible. So far the only things not in my rack are my modem (wired into the house phones for TWC digital phones.) and the 5 port gigabit switch on my desk.
 
The connection seemed alright this evening... was able to play WoW on the pc without interruption. Should I replace the antenna's on both the router and the card or do you think one or the other would do the trick? I guess I could start with replacing the one on the card and if that doesn't work go from there. Any recommendations on which one to buy?
 
I'm not an antenna expert, but with the little research I did (and the fact that its 5am and Im only up because I took a long nap this afternoon, I'd recommend these:
for the router: the Linksys HGA7t kit (x2 +7db antenna) should be good but are hard to come by. http://www.amazon.com/Linksys-High-...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1230895947&sr=1-1

for the desktop:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833998042

What that linksys uses (unless there are some significant hardware changes) are Reverse TNC connections. They are a bid harder to come by and pricier

Nearly all desktop adapters use RP-SMA jacks (and are afaik the easiet to find), and You can find decent antennas for $10-20 and better ones for $20+

For the record I used a cheap $10 antenna on my d-link router because the router is inside my rack and my rack is an enclosed rack. The antenna is actually slightly better than stock. My other router (on a seperate channel to prevent interference) is a netgear WPN824 with 7 internal antennas).

Now I'm off to bed, I can't tell if im even spelling words right...
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top