Extending wireless range?

[bertazoid]

Hi, I've got sky broadband at the moment it my house, and am using the modem/router they supplied us, however it's not very good - the range on it is not very far at all. I was wondering if I could use an intermediate peice of hardware to recieve, boost, and re-transmit the wireless signal, so I will be able to recieve it in certain parts of the house better. If this is possible, what can I use? Another router perhaps? I have a spare belkin wireless router from our old house, could I use that? If so how do I go about it?

Thanks alot

[cyberfish]

Yes, a repeater. Or an AP configured in repeater mode. Or just get a bigger (higher gain) external antenna.

If you flash a third party firmware (such as dd-wrt) onto your router (assuming it's a supported model), you may be able to change the transmit power, which helps quite a bit (default 10-20mW, 84mW recommended by the devs, 255mW if you want to make a toaster out of your router).

And yes, you can use the spare router as a repeater if you can flash it to a third party firmware (I'm not aware of any consumer router that has repeater mode in official firmware).

[edit]
If it's not EXTREMELY far, I would recommend upping the transmit power first (no need to buy anything assuming you don't brick your router while flashing it), if that didn't work, change to a higher gain antenna (~$10-$30), and if that doesn't work, add a repeater (router).
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