Extending Access Point Range wirelessly

Lets look at the options a little differently. What you need to do is improve the path between the client radio and the AP radio. That is a two way path, but almost anything that helps in one direction will be equally effective in the opposite direction. Ways to do that might be:

1) Increase the transmit power (equally on both ends). Small effect for a potentially large expenditure of resources. Doubling the power gives you 3 dB, which could also be described as "not much", or "not enough". This option is easy if it is already available, which is to say of your existing equipment allows you to increase the power. Otherwise, it's a waste... 2) Improve the path itself. This is *very* dependent on the physical circumstances. The biggest problem in this case is that while an experienced person can take one look and tell you to rotate the radio 90 degrees, or move it to avoid some obvious obstruction, none of that will be apparent to someone who has no background in how microwave radio signals propagate. 3) Provide a better antenna at one or both ends. This is the most likely to be productive, yet easy, option. It dovetails with item 2 above, and perhaps in the process of trying to experiment with the idea of a better antenna, a combination of better antennas and or better location and orientation of antennas might be *very* productive. 4) Worst case for resources and best case for results, is the option of installing a repeater in a location that provides a good path to both ends of the current link.

This is essentially Item 4 above. Pick a location with a *good* path to each of the current link ends. You can test that with the existing equipment, hopefully, by temporarily relocating one router to the point you think would work and testing the other at it's current location, and then move the client to other end and try it there too. Obviously that will all be *much* easier if someone has a laptop with a wifi builtin!

Some pointers about choosing a location. Walls are, at best, not good. If they contain chicken wire or other metal supports for plaster or perhaps foil backed insulation, or are made from concrete, they might be absolutely impassable. (If you have three of these to go through... even the repeater isn't going to make this work!) A regular wood frame wall with sheet rock and wood paneling isn't so bad, but you still lose something through every wall.

Antenna orientation is significant. A 1/2 wave antenna, the most common one seen, radiates in a donut shaped pattern. If it is vertically oriented that donut is omni direction in azimuth, but has less radiation as the elevation angle approaches vertical. So you do *not* want to place such an antenna directly above or below one end of the link. On the other hand, most of them can be swiveled around and position horizontally, which in a point to point link between two stationary radios is just ideal.

As to equipment... There are a number of options, and I'm no expert of picking between them. If you use an AP at a high point, you can use two client units at each end to connect to the AP. It doesn't actually have to have a wired connection to anything else (though usually it is easiest to arrange them that way). The client at one end can just as well be a router or a PC that can forward IP, and provide Internet access to the opposite end client unit that way.

Or you can put a repeater at that center point. That is something I'd recommend with mixed feelings. I've set up and used WRT54G routers from Linksys (with third party firmware) as repeaters. I am also currently using a WRE54G Repeater from Linksys. In all cases dealing with a WDS enabled repeater for

802.11b/g is technically a pain. They tend to only work with other equipment by the same manufacturer, have complex problems regarding security. For someone who does this stuff for fun can be just an all day joyride! (That may be Hell for anyone who doesn't play with radios compulsively.)

I have a WRT54G 20 feet from me right at first floor ceiling level, and a WRE54G located across the road near the ceiling on the second floor. That allows my laptop to solidly connect with

54Mbps rates when I'm across the road sitting on the first floor. Without the repeater connections are marginal at best, usually with 11 Mbps or less, and sometimes it just won't connect at all...

I've also done the same thing with a shot 400 yards down the road, where the client was at the wrong end of the building and the repeater was placed at one end of a building which is just barely protruding far enough to be line of sight. It turned out that playing with a directional antenna indicated the actual path being used was a "passive repeater" arrangement! Pointing it directly up the road to the AP did not produce the strongest signal, but pointing it across the road and just a little closer to the repeater than to the midway point gave the best signal. One of the buildings must have foil backed insulation, because I couldn't see anything obvious (it would only need be about the size of a car license plate, so it might be hard to notice too).

I've used both a WRT54G as a repeater (using Sveasoft's Satori firmware) and the WRE54G. The WRE54G is more expensive and less capable, but has some physical advantages because it is smaller and comes with a very nice wall mount. I don't recommend the WRE54G unless you happen to find an unhappy owner who wants to unload it for cheap. It's worth it at half price, but not at full price!

attached.

You didn't specify what brand/model router he has. If it is WDS Capable then you could buy a compatible (probably same brand) device that will operate in repeater mode. He will get half the throughput through the repeater but if you ar running B that is still about 2.75mbs If his wireless router doesnt support WDS then you could go for a USB dongle on his PC with a higher gain antenna

A simple reflector on the WAP is enough to cover my house, which is 100 feet long. If you are missing a few feet, or you can sometimes get a connection in a place you want a solid connection, you might just need a reflector.

I built a "windsurfer" for my Netgear router, for a cost of nearly nothing. I printed the template on the backside of some discarded HP photo paper, used a glue stick to paste some aluminum foil to it, and I was done... It took me about twenty minutes because I kept dropping the assembly on the floor as I was trying to tape it together.

EZ-12 The way my house is laid out, there is a 60 foot shot with two outside walls between the WAP and the dining room table. The signal with the reflector is not only 13dB stronger, it's more stable.

You don't mention what kind of wireless adapter is at the PC end. If it's an internal PCI, you can start by turning the PC so that the PC itself isn't blocking the signal. You could add a reflector. You could buy a short piece of cable to move the antenna to a better location.