Multi-base-station wireless network question

[Felix_the_Mac]

I am getting broadband intsalled on Tuesday. Hooray!

My telephone line comes in to the front of the house, my office is at the back.
So, I am going to put my new wireless broadband router in the front room and put some cat-5 around the outside of the house to the back room to plug into my Airport Extreme. This will give me full coverage broadband and wirless printing via the AE.

My questions are:
1) Should the 2 wireless base stations be configured to use the same or different channels (frequencies).

2) Is it possible for the Airport Extreme to act as a wireless repeater, so that it could sit in the middle of the house, connected neither to cat-5 nor to a telephone line, and re-broadcast the wireless signal it receives from the other basestation? (If not, why not? That would be really useful.

3) Will having 2 base stations mean I have to manually select which one to connect to in Panther, or can it do that itself based on the strongest available signal?

 

[windowsblowsass]

i think you can use two basestations like that but im not sure if having ethernet outside is a good idea

 

[jermsmingy]

First make sure that the wireless on the router and the other access point are both g or both b. You don't want one to be b and the other to be g. That being said, here is what you do.

You set the name of the wireless network on the router as ex. "yourlastname-wireless" and change the channel to 11 (it should be the default), then you change the name on the access point to the same thing that you set your router as and change the channel to 1 (6 will work, but I would use the farthest number from 11). You should be all set if you do this. I just did this in my house and it works perfectly.

If you set up the wireless this way, you should be able to walk from access point to access point and your computer should jump to the strongest access point without you even knowing.