wireless range extender what options?

[truz]

I have a wireless network that I need to access 2 houses down.

I have a house behind me (rental) I have access to and was thinking about a extender and putting it in the house behind me. However, I have a netgear rangemax wireless access point (requires cable to be ran) Is there other options of picking up the wireless signal and extending the range without wires?

I have a linksys router. I can pickup the connection with full bars from the house behind me, however the next house over I can hardly pickup the signal with 1 bar. I need to be at the back of the house where no wireless is picked up. With the extender it should have full signal.

 

[ab2650]

My WG602 has a "repeater" mode that you only supply the MAC address of the host access point. That would operate w/out wires.

 

[truz]

Do you think my access point would work like this?

 

[ab2650]

Do you think my access point would work like this?

You could try it. Basically you just need to know the hardware (MAC) address of the source of the wireless. IIRC, it simply repeats any wireless signal from that MAC address; meaning you don't have to muck around with setting up wireless security or whatnot - It just passes it on to the clients.

 

[ab2650]

OK, I just experimented with a neighbor's access point and putting my WG602 in Repeater mode. It works great! I could barely eek out their signal sitting on my couch, but the repeated signal comes in at 100% and it's definitely going over his network as there is no ethernet cable attached to my AP.

Some caveats to keep in mind:
* Remember to use the MAC address of the wireless interface of the host access point. There's a MAC address for the LAN interface, WAN interface (if it's a router) and the wireless interface.
* You can give your repeater AP a different SSID (network name). I just called mine "bridge" so I wouldn't get confused with what AP I was connecting to. You can make roaming seamless between APs by giving it the same SSID as the host AP.
* You should make sure that both the host and the repeater are set to the same channel and have the same security settings. At least, I couldn't get on the host network when I had my WPA turned on.

Good Luck! (This post was brought to you by ab2650's neighbors.)