Bridging wifi into wireless network

I live on a boat and rely mostly on wifi provided by marinas to connect to Internet. Sometimes, I am docked far away from the wifi transmitter and the signal received is too weak. I was told to install a system made of a high gain antenna, a wireless ethernet bridge and a router, all those wired, and then my computer connected wirelessly to the router. Would that work ? Do I need something different or do I need to add something to it? If this works, how do I know that my network that appears under "my networks" is connected to the marina ?

Reply to
brisegalets
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An outside rated client with an external antenna would work. I use it often for oil patch customers out in the field.

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> Products > Wireless Outdoor Radios Bottom of the page: DLB2701 500mW Conn. Radio

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N-F Omni-Directional Antennas for 2.4GHz ISM/WLAN and 3 Foot N-Male to N-Male cable from the Coax Cable page.

Don't use anymore higher gain antenna as any rocking of the boat would move the beam too far above or below the horizon.

Mount everything as high up as you can go and use an outdoor rated ethernet cable for signal and power. Inside, connect it directly to your computer. If you have more than one computer, connect the cable to a simple router and connect your computers to the router. You could even use a wireless router, just make sure its on a different channel than the outdoor client.

Reply to
DTC

On Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:12:14 GMT, "brisegalets" wrote in :

See the Wi-Fi on a Boat page in the wiki below.

Reply to
John Navas

"brisegalets" hath wroth:

Wi-Fi on a boat:

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

After seeking help here and reading as much as I could, I still need help. I know next to nothing as far as networking is concerned and I need guidance expressed in layman's words (I know, without fully understanding them what IP address, MAC address, DHCP, and a few other highly technical words mean) so that I can connect to the internet. My set up is as follows:

  1. Hardware : On a trawler, above the wheel house an antenna (I don't have the specs, but I know that the owner of the boat got it for 100 dollars from someone who claimed to be an expert). The antenna is connected via coax cable with a TNC connector to a Wireless G Bridge (WET54G). The bridge is connected via a regular ethernet cable to the port called "Internet" of a wireless G router (WRT54GS). The router is connected wirelessly to 2 toshiba satellite laptops, one with Windows XP, the other one with Windows Vista home basic.
  2. Software : Since I am very much novice, I refrained from tampering too much with the default settings. I set up both the bridge and the router on channel 6 (actually the bridge does not give me an option), I have disabled security and kept broadcasting of SSID on.

The only progress I have made so far is that I am now able to see the setup pages of both the bridge and the router on the computer, but I cannot go beyond the bridge. The default setting for both is that IP addresses are set automatically. Reading the various articles on Wireless Wiki, I have many unanswered question. Should I go from automatic configuration DCHP to static IP (or something else) , if yes what IP address should I assign, what is MTU, should I connect the bridge to a port marked computer 1, 2 3 or 4 instead of the port marked internet, should I use in that case a crossover cable, etc . . . .

I don't know if this is the right place to ask all those questions, but I have been on this thing almost full time for a week and I am getting quite distressed.

Bernard Lefevre

Reply to
brisegalets via HWKB.com

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