Straightforward out-of-the-box solution for extending WiFi range

Netgear is junk. Actually, now that you mention it, most dual band wifi routers have terrible reception. There are compromises in making a box cover two bands. That could be part of the problem.

I think the Buffalo ERP is already after the antenna. That is, they don't spec the transmitter power but rather the effectiveradiated power, which combines TX power and antenna gain. They don't expect you to put on a different antenna, so they spec the power of the whole signal path.

Reply to
miso
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" Specks are in overall dBm. They do not specify radio power and antenna gain separably ."

Hopefully this clears things up. The antennas are integral, so the power spec is the effective radiated power. Pretty much what I figured.

So it is 3dB more than the N450. But the key here is the long range unit that you are looking at is single band. Just 2.4G. Being single band helps a lot because the receive circuitry works so much better.

That said, I think you will find the N450 will work well. High power really doesn't save your arse because your client is not high power. Being powerful in one direction isn't very useful.

I still like that suggestion of using two DDWRT routers. The N450 is half of that equation since it has DDWRT right from the manufacturer.

Ipads and iphones are deaf.

They pretty much work when the router is in the room, but that is about it. Apple has been known to edit their user forums on rare occasions (mostly because they have caught shit when caught), but they don't even bother hiding the fact their wifi is crap. Hey, they have the biggest app selection, nice high res screens, and a loyal fan base. Apple can get away with selling devices with really shitty radio performance. Probably the best radios on earth are in Nokia phones, and look how they sell, or more correctly don't sell. ;-)

Reply to
miso

You're referring to the wireless signal, presumably.

Leave it exactly where it is. Go buy a pair of powerline adapters (assuming they're legal in her country/state), one of which has a Wireless Access Point built-in. Plug that one in at the top of the house - or whereever is required - and connect the other to her router with a short piece of ethernet cable. Configure the WAP on the powerline adapter to use the same SSID, passphrase, and encryption mode as on her main router, but use a different channel.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Davies

Hi Miso, I agree.

Older datasheets have different information than newer ones. Here's a datasheet on the UniFi Access Point Long Range (UAP-LR):

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It shows the EIRP is 27dBm + 3dBi = 30dBm (i.e., 1 Watt).

Thank you for that suggestion. I suspect there are three options:

  1. Turn off the WiFi router SSID
  2. Keep the SSID, but put the wired access point far away
  3. Keep the SSID, but change it to a different SSID

I think the third method might not work though, as it would be on a different network - but I'm not really sure since I've never used one of these $100 1 Watt access points before.

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

This is interesting, in that it's the solution that most of us can do for free (since there are a lot of a spare routers lying around).

What I like about it, is that we re-use a spare router as a repeater.

What I don't like is that the spare router is *still* anemic (they're all about 15 to 18 dBm into something like a 3 to 5 dBi antenna).

But, since people around her have a spare router, it just might work fine!

I'm not sure why DDRT is needed, since any router should be configurable into a repeater, right?

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

That makes sense. So, that would be 24dBm EIRP for that Buffalo (i.e., 1/4 Watt) versus something like 18 to 20 dBm EIRP for most Netgear routers (i.e., 1/10 Watt), so the Buffalo certainly has a place in this discussion - especially since it's an easy solution (which is part of the equation) for a grandmother to handle.

By way of correction, I just found out that the EIRP of the UniFi access points I googled for (which I've never used) is only about 30 dBm (not 36 dBm) but even so, that's a full Watt.

However, I think I have to give up on the access points as to complex. So, the Buffalo router has the advantage of simplicity.

The advantage of the Buffalo is simplicity and 4 times the normal power. The advantage of the UniFy access point is sheer power (3x the Buffalo); but that comes at the cost of complexity. Sigh.

What would be nice is a simple router that outputs 1 Watt (the legal limit).

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

Hi Miso, I understand what you're saying, as it's almost impossible to get the spec for the antenna gain of a typical home broadband router without going to the actual FCC report on the specific device.

So, pretty much, I assume *all* home broadband routers must be spec'ing out the EIRP, if they spec anything. So, at 24dBm (1/4 Watt) for the Buffalo, I would agree with you that this is the EIRP (and not the transmit power).

The nice thing is that the Buffalo is (presumably) simple to set up, and, the EIRP is probably more than double the power of a "typical" home broadband router, which, I assume is around 20dBm (1/10 Watt) EIRP.

However, just to state what I've found out, according to *this* datasheet, the Ubiquiti UniFy Access Point datasheet does specify the antenna gain and transmit power separately, so, I *assume* my EIRP calculations are correct:

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In *that* datasheet, they say the antenna gain is 3dBi for the UAP-LR, and the transmit power is up to 27 dBm. So, I get 30 dBm effective (1 Watt).

Of course, that huge power increase comes with an increase in complexity. Sigh... if only they made a 1 Watt home broadband router!

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

This has always confused me.

In a way, it makes sense, in that you can throw a football 50 yards to your kid, but the kid can't throw it back.

However, all the client has to to most of the time is RECEIVE the thrown football. So, it only needs receiver sensitivity.

It doesn't need throwing power, right?

It only needs the throwing power on the uplink, right?

So, aren't most connections downlinks?

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

Using your analogy, the _requests_ are footballs thrown by the client, but the simple fact is that _everything_ needs to be acknowledged, (TCP anyway) so two-way comms are an absolute must.

Greatly simplified.

Reply to
Char Jackson

Any wireless router can be used as an access point, and of course any access point can be used as an access point. So to me, it seems like a better solution to put a normal-powered AP (whether that AP starts out as a WiFi router or an AP) in the area where it's needed, versus trying to find something that's high-powered and possibly causes interference for 2 city blocks in every direction. Exaggerating to make a point.

Regarding SSIDs and channels, if you go with multiple AP's, I would use the same SSID on all of them but each would be on a different channel. Your channel choices (for the 2.4GHz band) are pretty much limited to 1, 6, and

  1. Experiment with those to see where you get the best results.

By the way, using multiple AP's does NOT mean the secondary AP's are on a different network. If you end up that way, you're misconfigured.

Reply to
Char Jackson

I see now. Better than before.

The request is the football thrown 150 feet by the father radio to the kid client.

The kid client acknowledges receipt, but, only weakly, such that some of the acknowledgements never make it back to the father.

So, the father throws the same football again, and again, because only some of the acknowledgements are getting back to him from the kid client.

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

I believe the TX power is for the transmitter plus antenna, especially since the antennas are integral. Hence the link I gave you where the poster thought the same thing.

The N450 has removable antennas, but it is MIMO, so you really wouldn't do that. They are longish around around 5dBi.

Reply to
miso

Some of the chipsets spec the lowest useable signal for reception.

So this dongle is good to -95dBm at the 11mbps setting. Thus if dad had a really really long arm, you could make your argument. But in real life, it is better to have a symmetric communications system.

Reply to
miso

Look at the receive spec of this dual bander. It craps out at -80dBm at the 11mbps spec. Like I said, these dual band devices tend to be worse than the single band devices.

Reply to
miso

Wow. You have a point. -80dBm is way too insensitive. I generally don't read the sensitivity specs, simply because I *assumed* they're usually pretty good (in the -97dBm to -99dBm range).

-80dBm is pretty bad.

I've found, only from my experience, that I need about 12 to 15dBm of "headroom" between the signal and the noise in order to reliably connect.

So, with a sensitivity of -80dBm, that would mean I would only connect when the signal is at about -65dBm to about -68dBm.

And, as this picture shows, even my current 2.4 GHz rooftop radio, which has a good clean WiFi signal from only a couple of miles away, is only getting a signal of about -55dBm (which is a great signal strength):

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My noise alone is -88dBm, as can be seen from that screenshot, so, no signal worse than about -72dBm to about -75dBm would even be connectable.

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

Oh oh ... that's bad news.

That would make the true (claimed) transmit power about 5dB below the

24dBm, so that makes it about 19dBm transmit power.

Given that my assumption is that most home broadband wifi routers have a transmit power of about 15dBm to about 18dBm being put into a 3dBi to

5dBi antenna, that would mean that the Buffalo isn't all that more powerful than the rest of the pack.

Of course, if it's as much as 3dB more powerful, it's still twice the power; but, it could be that it's only about 1dB more powerful, which isn't all that much.

Did I do the math correctly to form that tentative conclusion?

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

Those receive specs are not the noise floor. In theory, you should be able to maintain 11mbps reception at that level. But probably that is measured with a direct connection and a step attenuator. So I get your point that you might want to be 10 to 15 dB above the minimum detectable signal to account for crud in the aether, multipath, etc.

Those Tube-u usb dongles kick some serious ass for not much money. For yucks I ran the tube-u with a 16dBi gain panel antenna from a hill in Berkeley pointed at San Francisco. I never saw so many WAPs on a kismet screen. A few were Axis cameras with no cypto, but I have no idea if they could be viewed.

Anyway, today dual band is not so good. I won't pronounce it crap because the 5.GHz band certainly has less players on it, so it could potentially be better. But the gear certainly doesn't have the specs of the 2.4GHz products. The bad part is all the clients these days tend to be dual band, so they are probably compromised a bit.

Reply to
miso

It always confused me what the difference is. I never really understood these things as the only things I know are those encountered in daily use of the radio as my WiFi signal.

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I guess the "noise floor" is *my* noise (i.e., the environmental noise) of about -87dBm (which, I'm told, is quite high).

So, even though the receive sensitivity of the Rocket M2 that I'm using is around -94dBm to -98dBm, I'm not sure how much that matters, in practice anyway, given my noise is far above that level already.

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

I have a Bullet M2, which is hooked up to a different antenna about a mile or two away - for my second Internet feed - which worked just fine screwed directly into a planar antenna (low line losses).

I just tried logging into it, but I forgot the password so I'll have to climb up there and reset it in order to see what noise levels it sees. Darn. I like the newer POEs that have the reset button in the POE, instead of having to use the reset button in the radio on the roof.

I'm in the Santa Cruz mountains, so our line of sight is a good 20 miles in most directions. We can, theoretically, pick up antennas from all over the place.

My dream is to see if I can, technically, connect to a Starbucks

20 miles away in San Jose. I'm not sure how that works, but, I see that it's all about the antenna.

Luckily, the RocketM2 comes with a nice RocketDish antenna that is high gain; because I'm realizing it's more about the antenna than about the transmitter or receiver.

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

In theory, the dual band should be the best of all worlds. It should have less noise. And, it should have double the decibels right out of the box.

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

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