Wifi Extenders

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tglendye

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I am trying to get a wifi signal to my garage to run a smart light. The garage is approximately 125 feet from my house. I am looking for a wifi extender that will provide the signal to the garage. I have been looking mainly on Amazon and see all of the references are square footage, but I am looking for something that will provide a directional signal. Are there options that will extend/ repeat the wifi signal about 125 feet away? Thanks!
 

mmckenna

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Not sure what would work best for you, but years ago I had a co-worker who had about 20 acres of land and wanted to be able to run cameras to keep an eye on it.
He used some old Linksys WiFi radios running off 12 volt batteries with solar panels and reflashed the firmware with something that made them act like extenders. He had a few of them and had 100% coverage of his land.
He's long since retired, but I'm sure the info is out there on how to do it. You might be able to find some used Linksys wifi units on e-Bay cheap. You should be able to make it do what you want.
Also, since he was a ham (and I see you are too), he was able to use the WiFi channels that landed on the amateur radio portion of the 2.4GHz band and crank up the power a bit.
 

bharvey2

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I am trying to get a wifi signal to my garage to run a smart light. The garage is approximately 125 feet from my house. I am looking for a wifi extender that will provide the signal to the garage. I have been looking mainly on Amazon and see all of the references are square footage, but I am looking for something that will provide a directional signal. Are there options that will extend/ repeat the wifi signal about 125 feet away? Thanks!


I've addressed this scenario a number of times. My recommendation would be to use a pair of Ubiquiti Nanostations, one at your house and one at the garage. They can be used outdoors and you run CAT5/6 cable not coax to them. This avoids the signal loss that would likely be introduced over the coax at 2.4 or 5ghz. Documentation is available online to configure them as a wireless bridge which is what you're tying to accomplish. They are also PoE (Power over Ethernet) so you need only one cable to run to each of the Nanostations. It should be noted though that Ubiquiti has several flavors of PoE (wiring is standard but voltages may not be) so be ware of that when obtaining power sources should you need to buy them separately. Below is a link to one of the Nanostations. These use 24VDC so you need to buy 24VDC PoE injectors too. You can buy them from Ubiquiti as well.

 

tglendye

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Thanks guys for your help. Doing a little YouTubing now. Could make for an interesting project.
 

Golay

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We've been using one of these for a few years now. Gets moved around. Right now it's coverage for the front porch.
Happy with it. Does a good job.

 
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