Use a wireless router as a repeater for a laptop?

Hi all, I am wondering if it would be possible to bridge a wireless router with a wifi card in a laptop, so that the wireless router would essentially serve as an extended antenna for the wifi card.

I know that you can bridge two routers to extend the range from the base router, but that's not what I'm trying to do. Instead, I want to bridge the extra wireless router with the laptop, so that the extra router is basically transparent, serving only as an extension of the laptop's wifi.

Is such a configuration possible? I would be using something like DD-WRT firmware on an appropriate extra router.

Thanks for your help with this.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Danniken
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Isn't this just a wifi repeater?

Reply to
miso

Well I don't know, I am pretty much a newborn WRT wireless, and my track record with networking is pretty dismal.

I know you can set up an extra router as a repeater by bridging it with the main router, which involves setting up both of the routers to function in such a manner.

I am basically just trying to use the extra router as a "wireless antenna extender" for the laptop wireless card, without setting up anything differently in the main (WAN connected) router.

My apologies if I have some of the terms mixed and mingled.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Danniken

If you can bear to connect your laptop to your DD-WRT router with a cable, then you could use it as a wireless client bridge. You'll get much better throughput than with wifi repeating.

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alexd

Reply to
alexd

A repeater cuts the bandwidth in half, not that it really matters in a lot of situations. That is, if the internet pipe isn't very fast.

Sometimes your phone can't get wifi where the notebook can, since the notebooks often have better antennas Then a repeater can be handy if your phone can't do a faux ethernet via the usb port.

Reply to
miso

I forgot to mention that bridging can get ugly. If you have two existing networks and just bridge them, they can have address conflicts since the addresses were assigned before the bridge was established.

Reply to
miso

HUH ???

Just tell us, in plain words, what the problem/challenge is - and then maybe we can answer your questions...

Reply to
ps56k

Thanks Alex. I'm not too concerned with the throughput, it's extending the range that is the issue with this setup. That's a neat setup there, and I noticed another one that actually does something similar and lets me connect to the middle router wirelessly.

Unfortunately they are all still bridging the two routers, where you connect the laptop to the middle router, and configure the middle router to bridge to the main router. After looking around at all the examples I could find, I'm starting to think my end goal of being able to use the middle router as a wireless adaptor connected to the laptop might just not be possible.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Danniken

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I don't have a firm grasp on the all of the lingo. I want to configure a middle router such that it functions essentially as an extension of the wireless adaptor in my laptop. Once configured in this way, I would join whatever network I wanted through the standard interface on the laptop instead of first configuring the middle router to join the network.

Unfortunately, I do not think this is actually possible now that I have poked around a bit.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Danniken

yeah - you got it backwards..... it's the Access Point that is sending the "broadcast" which then can be "repeated". not the other way around.

That's why it's best to just ask the simple question... Which - you still have not really shared - There are several different ways to "extend" the range to a WiFi Access Point. or - even bypass the WiFi with other networking devices..

Reply to
ps56k

I'm puzzled by that statement, because that's pretty much what a wireless client bridge *is*.

alexd

Reply to
alexd

A wireless adaptor on a laptop uses the laptop's software to connect to an access point; I wanted to configure the middle router so that when it was set up and connected to the laptop, I would be able to use the laptop's software to connect to the far access point, using the middle router as a sort of "wireless adaptor" if you will.

In other words, I wanted to be able to see the far AP's SSID on the laptop's software, and connect to it using the laptop's normal "wireless connection" application.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Danniken

I've actually done this using two wireless adapters on the middle computer, one running client software and the other acting as an access point. Not sure if it can be done with just one.

Ben

Reply to
Ben Myers

I just did exactly what you're asking, as described in another thread.

The "router" I used was a Ubiquiti Nanobridge horn (without the dish), which is about the size & shape of a small 2D-cell flashlight.

The laptop is a dual-boot Win7/Ubuntu Thinkpad W510.

There's really no setup needed on the laptop; I simply turned off the internal WiFi NIC (the Lenovo has a hard switch to do that) and plugged the radio/router into the Ethernet port of the laptop.

The laptop works just fine, and now I can transmit and receive for miles around that laptop. Full details are in the current thread titled: "Straightforward out-of-the-box solution for extending WiFi range"

This particular router transmits at 27dBm which was too powerful for me, so I lowered it to 6dBm and STILl got a whopping -40dBm signal strength to my router about 50 feet away.

I'm pretty sure that I could move that router a mile away, and still connect to it (I haven't tested that yet), simply by clipping that Nanobridge M2 into its dish (which comes with it when you buy it).

Since the dish is 18dBi, and the radio/router is 27dBm, the transmit power available to that laptop is now 45dbM, which is over 30 Watts!

Compare that to the puny 0.5dBi antenna inside your laptop, with probably something like a 12 to at most 15dBm transmitter, which is a puny

0.01 to 0.02 Watts.
Reply to
Danny D'Amico

If I understand you correctly, I just did exactly what you want to do. The "router" I used to connect to my laptop was a Ubiquiti NanoBridge M2. It connected to a standard Netgear N600 home broadband router.

Here are the details that I had posted to a recent thread:

UPDATE:

After many hours of trying to get the settings just right, just now I was able to tremendously extend the WiFi range of my laptop, as a test, simply by connecting a Ubiquiti NanoBridge M2 feedhorn (sans dish antenna) to the Ethernet port. Here is my signal strength at the feedhorn, as seen through the laptop:

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Notice the noise is a tiny at -99dBm while the signal strength is huge at -44dBm (with a SNR of -44 - -99 = 55, if I did the math right).

This gets me 130Mbps between my Linux laptop & the home broadband router.

Here are the network settings that were necessary to make this work:

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And, here are the access-point specific wireless settings to make it connect to my home broadband router's SSID:

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With the dish antenna, that Nanobridge M2 has a gain of 41dB (i.e.,

23dBm transmit power + 18dBi antenna gain), which is far too powerful.

Since that calculates (if I did the math right?) to over 12 Watts, I had to lower the gain by removing the dish ... which dropped the gain down to 23dBm + 3dBi, or 26dB (which is a 0.4 Watts).

Even that was far too powerful for use in my house, so I dropped the transmit power of the feedhorn radio down to 6dBm, so with the 3dBi feedhorn-only gain, the screenshots above are at 6+3=9dB (0.008W) EIRP.

Even with the gain reduced as low as I could make it, I still got a connection strength of -44dBm and a connect speed of 130Mbps, so, it's at least a proof of concept that this is one way to extend the WiFi range of your laptop.

My goal will be to try to connect to my home broadband router from a mile or two down the road... so that's what I'll try next.

PS: Jeff Liebermann should be proud of me!

Here's the howto I wrote up ... (it can also be used at coffee shops!) BEGIN: How to use a Nanobridge M2 as your laptop wireless NIC!

  1. I reset the Nanobridge M2 radio to default settings as per this video:
    formatting link

I connected the POE to the Nanobridge M2. I reset the Nanobridge M2 back to factory defaults by holding the reset button down for 10sec (until all LEDs flashed)

  1. I set the Nanobridge M2 to be the Linux laptop wireless NIC as per this video:
    formatting link

  1. I turned off the wireless NIC inside the laptop with the hardware switch. Note: I could just as well have run this command on Ubuntu 13.10: $ sudo ifconfig wlan0 down

  2. I set the IP address of the laptop to be on the 192.168.1.XX subnet. $ sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.99 $ ifconfig (make sure eth0 is 192.168.1.something & that wlan0 is not up)

  1. I physically connected the Nanobridge M2 to the eth0 port of the laptop.

  2. I pinged the Nanobridge M2 $ ping 192.168.1.20 PING 192.168.1.20 (192.168.1.20) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 192.168.1.20: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.572 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.20: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.460 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.20: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.286 ms etc. (control C to escape)

  1. I logged into the Nanobridge M2 $ netscape 192.168.1.20 (ubnt, ubnt)

  2. I set the "Network" tab as follows: AirOS:Network Router (default is Bridge) WLAN Network Settings->DHCP (default is DHCP) LAN Network Settings->IP Address->192.168.10.20 (default is 192.168.1.1) [x]Enable NAT [x]Enable DHCP Server Range Start=192.168.10.100 Range End =192.168.10.200 Change->Apply

  1. I rebooted the Ubuntu PC (with the wlan0 card still turned off)

  2. I set eth0 to be on the same (new) subnet as the Nanobridge M2: $ sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.10.101

  1. I pinged the radio: $ ping 192.168.10.1 PING 192.168.10.1 (192.168.10.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 192.168.10.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.15 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.10.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.10.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.310 ms etc. (control + C to escape)

$ ping 192.168.10.20 PING 192.168.10.20 (192.168.10.20) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 192.168.10.20: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.71 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.10.20: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.308 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.10.20: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.242 ms etc. (control + C to escape)

  1. I logged into the Nanobridge M2: $ netscape http://192.168.10.20 (ubnt, ubnt)

  1. I set up the "Wireless" tab to connect to the home broadband router SSID: AirOS:Wireless SSID->Select (I sorted the signals by signal strength & encryption) I selected my WPA2-PSK encrypted network SSID. I scrolled to the bottom & hit select. Change->Apply

Note: I also had to set the DNS server by turning off DNS proxy Primary DNS server = 8.8.8.8 Secondary DNS server = 4.4.4.2

Voila!

Once I set up DNS (which wasn't described in the video), I was able to connect to the Internet, and, in fact, am using this connection to type this up to help myself (in the future) and others.

END OF: How to use a Nanobridge M2 as your laptop wireless NIC!

Reply to
Danny D'Amico

No, you connected to the far AP with the router's internal software, accessed by your laptop.

Yes, that's a pretty neat device.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Danniken

Jon Danniken scrit:

But, he could have set up that router as a repeater.

Reply to
Harold W.

A repeater for the far AP though, even though the laptop is on a different subnet, not a repeater for the laptop.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Danniken

WiFi repeaters are bidirectional (so when just two devices are involved it's hard to say it's for the far AP) and operate at OSI Layer 2, so both sides of the repeater are on the same subnet. No?

Reply to
Char Jackson

Hi Char. I can configure my "middle" router (with DD-WRT) as either a client bridge (clients have the same subnet as the "far" AP) or as a repeater* (clients have a different subnet as the "far" AP).

In this example, the "far" AP is the AP which is too far for my laptop to connect to, necessitating the use of the "middle" router in either bridge or repeater mode (ie, I'm using "far" in relation to the laptop).

(WAN)----(far AP) ^ --z-- ^(middle router) ^ --z-- ^(laptop)

*this being an atheros-based router, it is called "client" mode in DD-WRT.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Danniken

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