Wifi Range extension for a detached garage/shop building

sneasle · Jan 3, 2014

Hi all,

My inlaws have an old barn on thier property that they converted into a garage/shop space many years ago. They asked me recently if it was possible to extend their wifi out to the garage so they could use their laptops out there. Running an ethernet cable out there isn't really feasible due to distance, on top of the fact that both buildings are built on concrete slabs. I can't do powerline ethernet either as the house and the shop are on different services. I also don't think the standard wifi repeaters or range extenders would work due to the overall distance and the metal walls/roof of the barn and the wall/metal roof of the house.

That has brough me to the idea of converting one of my older routers, maybe my WRT54G or asus 520gu as a range extender of some sort by making it into a receiver/repeater by connecting a really high gain direction (a yagi for instance) to it's antenna ports for instance and then connecting their laptops (or another router configured as an AP) to the lan ports of the WRT54G.

Is that something that is doable in dd-wrt or tomato? I haven't done anything with those so I'm not really sure of their capabilities or if what I want to do is actually doable.

Barn ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ House
laptop <-> Ethernet <-> AP <--> High Gain Antenna <-~- wifi -~-> House router

RealBeast · Jan 3, 2014

Read THIS THREAD that I had with a poster with a similar issue a few weeks ago. All you need is two outdoor directional APs, and the cost should be under $200 -- if you have line of sight. Note the pictures of how it is set up and the recommended Ubiquiti outdoor APs. Also, it is far better to mount the APs on poles well above the ground level.

And you can use all your existing equipment inside, these just attach to an LAN port at each end like an access point would.

What you have proposed will not work well.

sneasle · Jan 3, 2014

Thanks RealBeast, good information there.

I've read through that, and I will consider that solution.

I'd like to use as much of the hardware I already have if possible. Exterior mounting on the barn is not an issue, in fact they already have a pole up that they have a cell signal repeater installed on (without it, you can't get cell reception inside the barn), but I'd rather not start punching holes in the side of the house if I can help it. This also appears to be slightly overkill as I only need to go about 200ft.

Can you elaborate on what ascpect of my thoughts would not work? If I can learn a little more about this topic in the process, I'm more than willing to get schooled by some veterans.

choucove · Jan 3, 2014

I'm gonna mimic what RealBeast has stated and suggest going with point-to-point wireless ethernet bridge using access points. I haven't set up a point-to-point bridge before using Ubiquiti access points (though I love their gear) but I have done it with enGenius wireless access points outdoor and really was pretty straight forward in that situation.

One thing you may consider is Ubiquiti actually makes a single product called the Wireless Ethernet Cable which is two directional antenna that are PoE to work as a point-to-point wireless bridge without having to configure any settings at all. Just plug both in, point them at each other, and there's even display on the front of the device to show the signal strength. I purchased a couple of these for some different customers and while they have been used indoors, they work great. Are able to broadcast a signal across the house with nice performance capabilities through that wireless bridge. I don't know if it would work quite as well as using two high performance long range wireless access points, but it would probably also be cheaper.

RealBeast · Jan 3, 2014

sneasle :

The problem is that for the described solution to work you need two outdoor directional APs aimed right at one another. Sure you can shoot a nice signal from the AP on the barn back to your house, but you need something to receive it and of course send signals back that distance to the barn AP. This set up creates an outdoor wireless bridge with little to no signal loss. I've drilled a ton of holes in peoples houses, once the cable is through and it is caulked under pressure to fill the surrounding space nobody notices and no heat is lost.

Only 200 feet? I though that you said that you were too far for an Ethernet cable (which is beyond 100 meters). My favorite is always an Ethernet cable of course, and I do lots of demo to make them happen -- it comes in outdoor underground CAT5e that works well.

I really think that those are your two alternatives, unless you want to put a directional AP inside and leave the window open.

I agree with choucove that enGenius products are excellent; I would use either Ubiquiti or enGenius as they are both good and relatively inexpensive.

sneasle · Jan 3, 2014

Well, I guess I should rephrase, the distance between the two building is ~200ft, with some of it being through a swamp area and some being through an area dense with tree roots. It makes the possibility of trenching a line a difficult one. Added to this that the house itself isn't wired for Ethernet (I couldn't talk them into running cat5 when they built the house, they insisted that wireless would be all they ever needed), there isn't an easy way for me to get a run of cable out, through the slab, across the distance, and then back up the barn slab without a lot of work.

So if I put an AP set to bridge mode in the barn with a high gain antenna aimed at the house, and an AP in the house with a high gain antenna aimed at the barn, it would work, but it's not a solid of a link as the units described previously?

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Wifi Range extension for a detached garage/shop building

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