Extending Wireless Range DIR-635

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Hey,

I have a DIR-635 and have moved into an old 1920's apartment with solid cement walls. The router is wireless N but that doesnt seem to help at all.

Seems I loose reception all over the house and down the far end of the house where my room is my iMac only gets 10% - 12% reception.

the house is about 22-24m in length. Would it be better to run cat5 through the roof and connect my imac directly?

I was thinking I would buy 2 wireless Hi Gain antennas and swap them for the 3 (leaving one of the standard ones on for recection at the front of the house) that is already on the back of the router, I was thinking of buying some cable and running maybe 2 through the roof and droping them down from the roof into my room and one in the hallway.

Do you think this will be ok? Will i loose reception? Are they worth the hassel? I have drawn a quick picture of what I was thinking of doing. There is a lot of space in the roof so that is no problem, I think my main concern was quality etc.. and if i was able to detatch the current antennas and replace them with cableing and new antennas around the house.. I dont know if routers were designed to do this or not..

Any advise would be great!!!!!!
 

cwa107


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In my experience, concrete walls (or any walls made of dense material) will certainly inhibit the signal, no matter how good the antennas are. The best thing you can do, which is true for any home, is to centrally locate the router and also mount it up as high as possible.
 
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HouseSetup.jpg
[/IMG]

this is the image i forgot to up load!
 

cwa107


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I would put it in bedroom 2. Run a long CAT5 cable to the modem. In the position it's in, you're projecting the signal outward, away from the house (picture a circle about 150' in diameter with the router in the center, that's how the signal is projected).
 
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bennjiboi
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Sorry - I'm a little confused... The modem and router is in the kitchen on top of the fridge.. directly next to a wall... I was thinking of running CAT5 from there to my room and drop it down but I would have liked a wireless option being that my partner's laptop wont get good reception in my room otherwise.. It's all well and good me having an ethernet connection but noone else at that end of the house will get anything close to a decent connection.
 

cwa107


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Sorry - I'm a little confused... The modem and router is in the kitchen on top of the fridge.. directly next to a wall... I was thinking of running CAT5 from there to my room and drop it down but I would have liked a wireless option being that my partner's laptop wont get good reception in my room otherwise.. It's all well and good me having an ethernet connection but noone else at that end of the house will get anything close to a decent connection.

I misunderstood. I didn't realize that you had a combination modem and router all-in-one.

While I understand you have external antennas, I don't think you actually need them. If you could just move the modem/router to bedroom two, the signal would likely be available in all parts of the home. Right now, this is roughly what's happening with the signal:

housesetup.jpg


Keeping in mind that the external antennas don't have nearly as much range as the router itself.
 
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bennjiboi
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I think that I'm confusing you! I have a Belkin modem and a DLink DIR-635 router. The pink curcles on the diagram are what i was thinking i should install to cover the range of the house. The red box is the current router and the modem is sitting next to it.

There is good signal in the lounge room and ok signal in the 2nd bedroom but from there is really really bad.

My first thought was to run CAT 5 from the router through the roof and drop it down into my room to my iMac but i would really like to extend the over all range of the network.

My only real concern was the router currentlly has 3 antennas attached, its a wireless N but still fairly poor signal. I was concerned about splitting up the antennas in case they actually needed to be all in the same place. I:E the back of the router.

I was not sure if this would impact things or if in fact my idea would work?

I understand what you are saying though, but if i use hi gain antennas in the places i want to will i achieve total cover over the house? And i guess my second question is will i see signal loss being that i have detatched 2 or the 3 antennas from the back of the router and moved them round the house?

Sorry to confuse you so much!
 

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OK, I'd go back to my original proposal. The modem and router are probably sitting together right now, right? If so, they are probably attached via a relatively short ethernet cable (between the ethernet port on the modem and the WAN port on the router).

What I'm suggesting is that you physically relocate the router to Bedroom 2 (which is central). Then, assuming the modem can't be moved because it's located near the cable/DSL jack, string a long Ethernet cable between the router and the modem. Then, your wireless network should extend to all corners of your home for the two computers to access.
 
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bennjiboi
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Agh... OK! Yeah the modem and router are sitting together and the ethernet cord is short. I'll try that and see how things go.

Thanks for your advice!
 

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