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New Wireless Setup - best ways to expand area coverage?

Hi all... have a few questions. I'm in charge of setting up the private wireless in our new fire station, recently built. There are two areas

- office area and living quarters, both separated by a large garage for the fire trucks. We're going to use a cable modem, with access to cable from either side. We have access to one port on the internal network, so that I can setup one router and one access point. The router on one side, with the AP on the other - does not matter which side either goes on.

I setup my personal NetGear WRT834B Draft-N router in a few different places and wandered around with my laptop to check signals. In the office side, there is no place to hook up the cable modem in the middle/central area, so it will be on one end or the other. Signals on the other end are basically unusable. With it set in the center of the office side, signal was good in all areas - but no cable access. The entire office side is sheetrocked ceiling.

On the living quarters side, the access can be anywhere on a longer, straight hallway, Center placed access is good, with one bedroom on the longer side at the end have ok signal. This area has a drop ceiling and cable access in all rooms.

Here's my questions - would it be better to run the router on the living side, and run an access point to the other end of the hallway, via cabling up thru the drop ceiling, and use the one internal network cable port to the office side to run an access point there with a higher gain omni directional antenna in the center area where we had decent signal everywhere?

Or run one router in the middle of the living area hallway with an higher gain antenna as well as the access point in the Office area with new antenna?

should we look into something like the Meraki mesh with multiple access nodes and secure them somehow?

I've seen info on the 'powerline' setups, but I seriously doubt these would work well for us, even if the city allowed us to use them- are they usable and reliable?

Would something like the Apple Airport Express be the ticket? I've read that for every extra repeater you use, you half your bandwidth (true? no idea...)

We have NONE of the hardware right now... and the computers the guys have range from high tech to ancient POS's. Some use USB wireless cards, some have internal B, some have G and I think I'm the only one with N. Should we go with N since it supposedly has better range, or are we better of to go G and use the saved money for the antennas?

At anytime, there could be no one on the system or as many as 6-8 people on it cruising the web, downloading who knows what, and possibly even some gaming going on.

Any ideas, products, links and helpful insight would be GREATLY appreciated... I got roped into this just because I've setup the wireless in my house... one router and two computers!

LOL... I'm non networking genius, so HELP!! Jim

Reply to
swissy.jim
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I installed two APs in a fire station, one in the east side crew area and one in the west side office area. I used channels 1 and 11. With the equipment bay empty, I could get a good signal from both APs, but when four engines were parked inside, only one AP was usable.

Reply to
DTC

Going from the crew area to the office area, accross the apparatus bay, is no problem - the station is wired for LAN use, and the city is giving us one line for our wireless use. I plan on putting the router wherever, then plugging a cable into a port on the router and the wall jack, then on the other end of the station, using the one port given to use there (directly wired to the other port on the other side where the router is) and plugging it into the access point. This way it's the same as directly hard wired (it is actually). I'm not worried about the signal strength going from one side to the other - thats the easy part with the wired port given to us. I'm more worried about the access in each side, making sure that there is coverage in the entire area with minimal weak areas or dead spots.

Sorry if I didn't explain myself a little better... I've been looking around so much on the 'Net regarding this my brain is going to meltdown

Reply to
swissy.jim

We tried the on one AP in the engine bay, but when all the trucks were in there...coverage got real spotty.

Since both sides are wired to each other, I'd look at an AP in both areas one different channels. Even a cheap Linksys can be had from Walmart for under $60.

Reply to
DTC

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