Set Up A WiFi/Wireless-N Repeater

If you have one of these cute little plug-in WiFi repeaters, then here's the skinny on getting it going.

If, like me, you picked it up at an opp shop (thrift store) and had no idea how to set it up, I can save you an hour of frustration with network and wifi scanners and pressing reset buttons to no avail. I figured it out, as I said, in an hour that included a lot of swearing.

I should have been smart and googled it, but I figured it was such a ticky-tacky POS that it'd be nigh on impossible to find info on the thing anyway. Yeah. I'm that kind of stupid sometimes. 

WiFi / Wireless-N Repeaters

See image. These are all manner of little gadgets that look similar to the one pictured. I reckon they may all use the same internals. Sorry for the crap photo but I just realised I had no picture of my own of the gizmo and . . .  - anyway - here it is.

Wi Fi Repeater, typical

And yes you can find a quite a few instructions and videos online. But for the main purpose these things are generally bought for, the setup is pretty easy. The hardest thing (as I found out) is when you get a secondhand one that someone else has set up and then sold with their configuration in memory. 

It means that the repeater is looking for an access point that's in someone else's house and will never just work for you out of the box. 

I'm not (totally) stupid and I pressed that reset button several times, for varying lengths of time (none, as it turns out, longer than 29 seconds when the reset period is 30...) all to no avail. Then I found my network and wifi scanners and and a wireless network I didn't know and couldn't connect to it. 

Finally I did hold that button down for long enough and this is the sequence of events you need to follow: 

1. Power on.
   Plug it into a power point near your main wifi router for the setup. It's cool, it won't lose that setup if you unplug it to move it.
2. Hold Reset button 30sec until lights blink off.
   This is my crucial mistake - it takes a l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-g press of the button, but you'll know it's worked when the lights along the right hand edge turn off for a few seconds. 
   LET GO OF THE BUTTON NOW. 
   Sorry, I got a bit squirrelly there. 
3. Connect to the new WiFi network that comes up.
   You'll see some variation of "WiFi-Repeater" or the like come up when the device has reset completely. That can take a minute or so. 
   (Protip: You can also plug an ethernet cable into your laptop and the repeater but I used an Ideapad with no ethernet jack, and wifi worked just fine.)
4. Point your web browser to 192.168.10.1 
   As I found out, that's the IP address mentioned on most of the sites I've subsequently checked, which is why I think all the devices from all manufacturers have the same guts inside.
5. Quick Easy Setup.
   The easiest setup is to click the "Repeater" button on the screen that comes up, examine the list of WiFi access points and networks that comes up, and tell it which one is your Wifi network AP to repeat. 
6. Take a bow. 
   There's no fanfare, just unlug it, put it wherever you need it, and then log into the network it creates and be transparently routed to your network. 

There are of course gotchas. 

The further you put it from your main AP (Access Point) the less usable signal it will receive so the slower your connection will be. I've found that no more than 25 metres is okay as the receiver in the gizmo isn't all that sensitive. Mind you, that's also through three walls in our place. And similarly, ity only extends the range by about the same amount. But your mileage will vary depending on your layout and your primary AP's capabilities. 

In our case it made the difference of -86db without a repeater and around -60db (the closer to 0db the better as far as signal strength - RSSI - is concerned, -86db is less than a bar, -60db was about two and a bit bars out of four) with it - and that was enough for us. It sounds like such a little difference when expressed in decibels (db) but every 3db gained is something like a doubling of the received signal so it's actually a good gain. 

It's horses for courses. We have a network provider's free router and like all of them it's made for apartments, with a low signal strength so that the adjacent eight apartments don't all have to try and overcome your WiFi signal. In a separate house, that makes a lot less sense because from our front room to our rearmost room is about the same as from one wall of an apartment through the opposite wall and the opposite wall of the adjoining place. There's no such limitation in suburban houses but al;l the domestic routers are the same, really really weak.

And there are also a lot of cool things I've missed out in this quick tute - but now you know you can reset your repeater anytime and try out the different configurations, which include some very useful ones. 

Situations

I have an AP in the garage, which is also my workshop. The ideal way to get a signal out there would have been to just to buy a more powerful commercial AP (and some of which can actually form "beams" to concentrate the signals where it's needed) but I don't have the spare several hundred - and up to thousand - that one of those beasts can set you back. The wifi repeater gizmo above fitted right in between the main AP and the garage - but it hasn't the power to punch through the metal walls. 

Also - an AP can be put into Bridge or Repeater mode but it's not a well-executed technology as domestic routers are made for the hoi polloi muggles. But you can feed your network into one using an ethernet cable and messing with a few settings. I had to use a "virtual network cable" because we can't put holes in the walls of the house or the garage, but I did get it going. I can now shut the door and be in a completely metal-enclosed garage and still have Internet access. 

I'll make another post soon in which I explain how a person on a tight budget (preferably under fifty bucks) can make that happen. WARNING: It involves a LOT of opp-shopping and scouring through local garage sales and buy/swap/sell pages.

So I'll see you in another post soon! For now, please share this article, check out my (newspaper icon above) list of other posts and maybe sign up to the newsletter, or - most important way to help - hit the Ko-Fi cup or Paypal icons and make a donation to help me with the online costs and maybe some of the hardware. You know you want to...