WRT54GL - increase range?

[myf360f1]

Hi all,

I am running one of these routers using the standard antenna's and was wondering if I bought some 9DB high gain antenna's off ebay would they help with extending the range?

Your thoughts please?

[rob916]

An external antenna most certainly would help.

There are some good firmware hacks for that unit which enable power increases etc.

Make sure you are confident with what you are doing if hacking it or you could brick it.

[myf360f1]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the info, not really after an external antenna, just want to push my current signal a little further. Its a long narrow house and the points are at opposite ends.

As for the hack, not that confident but will keep the link for future reference.

Here was what I was thinking

Cheers

[rob916]

I have a china cheapie
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/10-dBi-Wireless-WIFI-Antenna-Booster-WLAN-RP-SMA-Stand_W0QQitemZ370228121830QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_N etworking?hash=item563350d0e6&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14 &_trkparms=65%3A1|66%3A4|39%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A2 00

It improves range and strength in my house tremendously.

[myf360f1]

Ok thats a good one, so on my router there are 2 antennas presumably one for sending and the other for receiving, do I replace both with 2 of these ?

[mickc]

or 1 of these

depends on how far you need to go
you only need to replace 1 antenna

[Moof]

I have a china cheapie
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/10-dBi-Wireless-WIFI-Antenna-Booster-WLAN-RP-SMA-Stand_W0QQitemZ370228121830QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_N etworking?hash=item563350d0e6&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14 &_trkparms=65%3A1|66%3A4|39%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A2 00

It improves range and strength in my house tremendously.

Be careful with this one as I believe it has a TNC connector on the antenna and you may need a RP TNC.

Reverse-polarity TNC (RP-TNC) is a variation of the TNC specification which reverses the polarity of the interface. This is usually achieved by incorporating the female contacts normally found in jacks into the plug, and the male contacts normally found in plugs into the jack. RP-TNC connectors are widely used by equipment manufacturers to comply with specific local regulations, i.e. those from the , which are designed to prevent consumers from connecting antennas which exhibit gain and therefore breach compliance. This is the case for the popular Cisco line of Wi-Fi products. RP-TNC can also be abbreviated as RTNC.

[myf360f1]

Thanks moof, good pick up. I would have missed that one for sure


Thanks Mickc, I already have a Linksys range expander in the network WRE54G but was hoping to remove that by installing the bigger ears...Lol

[rob916]

Sorry, I forgot about the connector issues.

[porkop]

RpTNC and RpSMA both genders are readily available to terminate your own cables.

[myf360f1]

Hi Guys,

The WRt54GL has 2 antennas which one is which or are they both send+receive??

[urban_s0ulja]

think they do both mate

[myf360f1]

Thanks Urban, trying to extend the range of my router so it helps out the TP link AP. Too much freezing happening on the Dream.

[Pugs]

why not get a fixed cable installed ??? alot faster then wireless esp "G"

[urban_s0ulja]

Thanks Urban, trying to extend the range of my router so it helps out the TP link AP. Too much freezing happening on the Dream.

what kind of signal are you getting on it?

dreambox freezing can be caused by a number of issues.

[myf360f1]

I'm not sure the correct way of doing it, but I connect a laptop upto the AP and see the signal strength which is pretty low ( long narrow house).


"why not get a fixed cable installed ??? alot faster then wireless esp "G"" - Not possible pugs, access is a nightmare.

[crypto7]

Hi Guys,

The WRt54GL has 2 antennas which one is which or are they both send+receive??

The 2 antennas will me SIMO or MIMO (see below).
Keep in mind that for a radio to work for WiFi you need the signal to go both ways, You can have the best signal get to your PC from you AP, but if the AP never hears the PC, comms wont work.
Stronger Signals means that there is less chance of errors, thus higher speeds. With that in mind, try to put gain at the PC end as well.

=== Below is from wikipedia ====
Up to now, multi-antenna MIMO (or Single user MIMO) technology has been mainly developed and is implemented in some standards, e.g. 802.11n (draft) products.

SISO/SIMO/MISO are degenerate cases of MIMO
Multiple-input and single-output (MISO) is a degenerate case when the receiver has a single antenna.
Single-input and multiple-output (SIMO) is a degenerate case when the transmitter has a single antenna.
single-input single-output (SISO) is a radio system where neither the transmitter nor receiver have multiple antenna.
Principal single-user MIMO techniques
Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (BLAST), Gerard. J. Foschini (1996)
Per Antenna Rate Control (PARC), Varanasi, Guess (1998), Chung, Huang, Lozano (2001)
Selective Per Antenna Rate Control (SPARC), Ericsson (2004)
Some limitations
The physical antenna spacing are selected to be large-multiple wavelengths at the base station. The antenna separation at the receiver is heavily space constrained in hand sets, though advanced antenna design and algorithm techniques are under discussion. Refer to: Advanced MIMO

[porkop]

Hi Guys,

The WRt54GL has 2 antennas which one is which or are they both send+receive??

think they do both mate

The 2 antennas will me SIMO or MIMO (see below).
Keep in mind that for a radio to work for WiFi you need the signal to go both ways, You can have the best signal get to your PC from you AP, but if the AP never hears the PC, comms wont work.
Stronger Signals means that there is less chance of errors, thus higher speeds. With that in mind, try to put gain at the PC end as well.

=== Below is from wikipedia ====
Up to now, multi-antenna MIMO (or Single user MIMO) technology has been mainly developed and is implemented in some standards, e.g. 802.11n (draft) products.

SISO/SIMO/MISO are degenerate cases of MIMO
Multiple-input and single-output (MISO) is a degenerate case when the receiver has a single antenna.
Single-input and multiple-output (SIMO) is a degenerate case when the transmitter has a single antenna.
single-input single-output (SISO) is a radio system where neither the transmitter nor receiver have multiple antenna.
Principal single-user MIMO techniques
Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (BLAST), Gerard. J. Foschini (1996)
Per Antenna Rate Control (PARC), Varanasi, Guess (1998), Chung, Huang, Lozano (2001)
Selective Per Antenna Rate Control (SPARC), Ericsson (2004)
Some limitations
The physical antenna spacing are selected to be large-multiple wavelengths at the base station. The antenna separation at the receiver is heavily space constrained in hand sets, though advanced antenna design and algorithm techniques are under discussion. Refer to: Advanced MIMO

I thought that one was a diversity receive antenna and that you could switch between single (primary) operationa and diversity received on secondary antenna??


At least that is the case with all dual antenna AP's I have come accross

[crypto7]

That is one of the MIMO functions...

Quote below
Functions of MIMO
MIMO can be sub-divided into three main categories, precoding, spatial multiplexing or SM, and diversity coding.

Precoding is multi-layer beamforming in a narrow sense or all spatial processing at the transmitter in a wide-sense. In (single-layer) beamforming, the same signal is emitted from each of the transmit antennas with appropriate phase (and sometimes gain) weighting such that the signal power is maximized at the receiver input. The benefits of beamforming are to increase the signal gain from constructive combining and to reduce the multipath fading effect. In the absence of scattering, beamforming results in a well defined directional pattern, but in typical cellular conventional beams are not a good analogy. When the receiver has multiple antennas, the transmit beamforming cannot simultaneously maximize the signal level at all of the receive antenna and precoding is used. Note that precoding requires knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter.

Spatial multiplexing requires MIMO antenna configuration. In spatial multiplexing, a high rate signal is split into multiple lower rate streams and each stream is transmitted from a different transmit antenna in the same frequency channel. If these signals arrive at the receiver antenna array with sufficiently different spatial signatures, the receiver can separate these streams, creating parallel channels for free. Spatial multiplexing is a very powerful technique for increasing channel capacity at higher Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). The maximum number of spatial streams is limited by the lesser in the number of antennas at the transmitter or receiver. Spatial multiplexing can be used with or without transmit channel knowledge.

Diversity Coding techniques are used when there is no channel knowledge at the transmitter. In diversity methods a single stream (unlike multiple streams in spatial multiplexing) is transmitted, but the signal is coded using techniques called space-time coding. The signal is emitted from each of the transmit antennas using certain principles of full or near orthogonal coding. Diversity exploits the independent fading in the multiple antenna links to enhance signal diversity. Because there is no channel knowledge, there is no beamforming or array gain from diversity coding.

Spatial multiplexing can also be combined with precoding when the channel is known at the transmitter or combined with diversity coding when decoding reliability is in trade-off.