Advanced Wireless

[ThaMan]

I am wondering. Is it possible to take two wireless routers and connect them together wirelessly?

My situation is, I am trying to connect my brother's house and my mom's house together through a wireless router. My mom has wireless NIC's. I've tried B, G and N, and they all do the same thing. The signal is too marginal. It works for a few minutes, then disconnects. I even added the high gain antennas to the Wireless B Linksys Router.

I have a spare Linksys B router. I know the router has a higher output than the NICs do, so I was wondering if I could set up the spare router somehow to be like a repeater, and then connect the Wireless NIC's into that router.

Thoughts?

[Walterus]

I am wondering. Is it possible to take two wireless routers and connect them together wirelessly?

My situation is, I am trying to connect my brother's house and my mom's house together through a wireless router. My mom has wireless NIC's. I've tried B, G and N, and they all do the same thing. The signal is too marginal. It works for a few minutes, then disconnects. I even added the high gain antennas to the Wireless B Linksys Router.

I have a spare Linksys B router. I know the router has a higher output than the NICs do, so I was wondering if I could set up the spare router somehow to be like a repeater, and then connect the Wireless NIC's into that router.

Thoughts?

I had that problem in the house of one of our employees. We used LinkSys and the only way to fix it was with a repeater.

ADSL IN - Cable - Wireless Router - cable - Repeater - Cable - Wireless Router

Maybe other manufacturers has a better solution.

[Kasu]

I believe you can do the repeater part with DD-WRT (if your router is supported).

I have 3 wireless routers at home to communicate wirelessly (none repeating the signal however). 1 is setup as my router, the other 2 are setup as a gateway back to my main router. Was pretty easy to setup.

However, I don't have anything repeating the single between these devices. While I lose signal from most of my wifi devices on one end of my house, one of my wireless router continues to work and communicate just fine with the main wireless router.

[ThaMan]

I believe you can do the repeater part with DD-WRT (if your router is supported).

I have 3 wireless routers at home to communicate wirelessly (none repeating the signal however). 1 is setup as my router, the other 2 are setup as a gateway back to my main router. Was pretty easy to setup.

However, I don't have anything repeating the single between these devices. While I lose signal from most of my wifi devices on one end of my house, one of my wireless router continues to work and communicate just fine with the main wireless router.
That sounds like what I need. It doesn't really need to repeat, since she won't be playing games. It just needs to communicate through the whole network. Does yours do that? If so, can you point me to more info on this DD-WRT thing you speak of? I'll see if it works with my Linksyses. :)

[ThaMan]

I had that problem in the house of one of our employees. We used LinkSys and the only way to fix it was with a repeater.

ADSL IN - Cable - Wireless Router - cable - Repeater - Cable - Wireless Router

Maybe other manufacturers has a better solution.I went Fiber Optic at work, but that is out of my mom's budget. :)

[Kasu]

That sounds like what I need. It doesn't really need to repeat, since she won't be playing games. It just needs to communicate through the whole network. Does yours do that? If so, can you point me to more info on this DD-WRT thing you speak of? I'll see if it works with my Linksyses. :)

Yea DD-WRT is the bomb. Its extremely solid (posted in a previous wireless thread about how I never troubleshoot it or reboot since I set it up).

Here is the website

http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php

if you dig, they have the models they supported listed. Its a pretty easy install (instructions are on the site as well).

Once you get it setup, you need to hit the wiki on their site to configure the router/wireless gateway setup. If i remember, it worked perfectly with the instructions they provided.

You need to first setup one as your router, setup DHCP and setup a WEP key (when I setup you had to use WEP, other protocols weren't supported in a wireless gateway setup). Then you manually configure you gateways with a static IP on the same subnet, setup WEP to use the same network name and WEP key as your main router.

All your wireless clients (and gateways) will only communicate with your main router. However you will have the ability to hard wire LAN clients into your newly setup gateways.

[Kamui]

LinkSys routers (and DD-WRT / OpenWRT) should have "wireless bridge" or repeater modes.
Your are right in thinking the routers have a higher output; 1 watt for routers, 100mw for clients (as defined in IEE 802.11 specifications. May have changed for N)
Wireless bridges will only server as point-to-point connection, so you'll need a wire to hook up the remote PC to the bridged router.
Wireless Repeater is more ideal for you.

There are also standalone repeaters that sell for much less than whole routers (as they are relatively dumb boxes).

It should be noted - although this won't affect your mother much - every wireless hope substantially adds to the roundtrip time and decreases throughput (more devices talking in the airspace = less time for each device to talk)

[ThaMan]

Thanks guys. I figured it could be done without having to purchase another product, since I have these laying around. It gives me a good place to start.

Plus, in the process, I get to learn something new. Yeah me :)