On Jan 4, 9:12*pm, "dennis meissner" wrote:
wrote in message

...





I stumbled upon a pretty cool thing the other day.

My wireless router is in the front upstairs corner of my house, and
while it has served me well over the past few years, I recently built
a shop in the opposite corner of my backyard. *The wireless network
just wouldn't reach that far.

I upgraded the router to a D-link Extreme N, but that only helped a
little. *I was getting ready to think about external antennas or
repeaters, and found the web page for dd-wrt.com *It's a web page for
open source software written to run on certain models of wireless
routers that adds (and uncovers) lots of settings and capabilities.

In short, I just got finished loading new code into a new Linksys
WRT54GL router, and then setting it up to be a wireless repeater. *It
cost about half of what a decent repeater would, and took about 30
minutes of reading and 20 minutes or so of uploading, resetting, and
configuring to get it working. *It's now sitting on a shelf in the
back corner of the house, and it's giving me about a 90% signal down
in the shop. *Plus, I retained full WPA security both in the link to
the main router and in the repeated link to the shop. *It just shows
up as a new SSID with a different IP address range. *Pretty slick.

Just curious... What kind of a wireless nic do you have in your pc in the
shop? *Did you try an "extreme n" nic? *That may eliminate the need for a
repeater.

Good info on the wrt54gl though...

thanks
Dennis

The shop PC is a laptop with a built-in G nic. I looked into USB N
nics, but was worried that they wouldn't have a good enough antenna.
I found a USB G nic that had a removable antenna (so it could
accomodate an external directional), but then the cost is up there.
Besides, the repeater also gave me excellent signal on the deck, which
had a very weak signal before.