extending wifi range

December 5, 2005 9:49 AM

Can I set up a wifi "repeater" to extend the range of my wifi?

I'm running a DLink DI-614+ wifi router installed on one side of the house, and now need to extend the range to cover a detached studio on the other side of the house. All the house gets signal but the studio doesn't, so I'd like to put some kind of repeater on that side of the house -- not wired, but picking up from the DLink and retransmitting signal (maybe on another band? I'm pretty ignorant about wifi.) Is there such a thing? I don't care about the '+' just the basic wifi.

The distances are ~20 ft from DLink to where the repeater would be, and another ~20 ft to cover all the studio. (The reason the studio doesn't get signal at present is that the house & studio are built into the rock of a hill, with rock & reinforced concrete between DLink and studio.)

To clarify: there's clear line-of-sight with only a single internal wall from the current DLink to the place where I want to put the "repeater", and again clear line from there to the studio. The repeater would be the way of getting round the corner, so to speak. I'm not expecting to transmit through rock.

I also hope to make a similar arrangement at my wife's office, where the SBC DSL wifi modem doesn't reach the far end of the office.

posted by anadem to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Does the 614 even support WDS? I was trying to find this out the other day... according to the DLink website, the 614 wireless router doesn't have WDS capabilities. Hopefully I'm wrong!
posted by moxyberry at 9:52 AM on December 5, 2005

At least on paper, this should do what you need. The writeup is a bit confusing, and I'm not certain it will repeat 11b signals or only 11g, so you might want to verify with D-Link that it would work to do what you need.
posted by Malor at 10:01 AM on December 5, 2005

Oh and DEFINITELY ABSOLUTELY FOR SURE use WPA. WEP, even the 128-bit flavor, is now horribly insecure and can be broken in well under a minute by anyone with the right software.
posted by Malor at 10:02 AM on December 5, 2005

I've done it using WDS, two Linksys WRT-54g(s) routers, and the Sveasoft firmware.
posted by reverendX at 10:42 AM on December 5, 2005

If you're handy you can make your router antenna more directional and point it at the detached studio, with a coffee can. I haven't tried it and I'm sure it will take some experimentation to get it right, but I find experimenting with physical bits easier than with computer bits.
The website has other options for giving your antenna higher gain.
posted by mediaddict at 10:56 AM on December 5, 2005

What they all said.

However, the d-link does not support WDS that I'm aware of, so you should look into finding two cheap Linksys WRT54G's and using those.

Actually, with the aforementioned Sveasoft firmware, you can up the transmit power of your antennae, which may solve your problem with only one router depending on how much further you really need your signal to go.
posted by twiggy at 12:53 PM on December 5, 2005

Here's a link to a great deal on WRT54g routers if you want. Get one for $10...

Hey reverendX -- do you have WPA on that WDS network? I can't get it going with WPA, but some people have....
posted by twiggy at 3:10 PM on December 5, 2005

I like this.
posted by Slap Incognito at 5:58 PM on December 5, 2005

twiggy: I was able to get WPA working on the WDS network. I had read about potential problems with it, but it just worked for me!
posted by reverendX at 9:31 AM on December 7, 2005