This can't be as hard as I'm making it. The modem and router are inside the house. Exterior walls are mostly stone. The "barn" is a 2-story free-standing steel building about 100feet from the room where the router is.

I want to be able to walk with my phone/laptop/etc from the house to the barn with no interruption in wifi... and have good wifi in the entire general area you see in the pic.

I need somebody to talk about repeaters, antennas, extenders, etc... and make it easy to understand.

 

Do you want to spend money on a for sure system or dink around with hacking routers and firmware and stuff?

 

Part of the problem is that I've been doing homework for the past couple days, and every time I think I understand how the various products work, I hear somebody say "no, you can't do that".

What I think I need is a new router with the capability of an external antenna... the units internal antenna will cover the inside of the house, and the external antenna will mount on the house just outside the window. That should get enough signal outside that I can set up a line-of-sight repeater/hot-spot on the roof of the barn that will cover a larger area.

Eventually, I might want to use another repeater/extender at a spot a few hundred yards away that is line-of-sight as well, but that's a secondary consideration.

The problem is that I'm just not finding a setup that spells out "this will work for what you want to do".

 

If the barn runs on the same power as the house and only the house connected you could do ethernet over wall plug electrical input and run a 2nd router in the barn. Point the gateway to the other router back at the house.

Or you can run a very long underground ethernet wire to another router to the barn.

Possibly look into directional antennas / repeaters. WiMax

I'd try running a ethernet cord to the other corner of the house and have an outside repeater mounted facing the barn. I would focus on getting wifi to the furthest extent of the barn so overall its great coverage everywhere.

 

I have the older version of this router, and my iPhone connects to my home network when I'm 3 or 4 houses down the street. Worth checking out.

 

Panasonic HD-PLC Ethernet Adaptor (Power Line Communication) review - CNET

I bought this and it is still in the box. If it is of any use to you, let me know.

 

I have the older N version of this, and the range is pretty amazing.

 

Something like that might be in the cards because it has the ability to connect an external antenna, which I think I'm going to need.

The barn is on a different meter... quick check says one of those won't work, but it's good to know about, I checked out the technology and it's pretty cool.

 

I'm responding to this thread as a placeholder so that it shows up in my "Threads I posted in" view.

Tomorrow at work I'll see who makes the extenders that we use to hop from building to building. They're extremely inexpensive and plug right into RJ45 ethernet.

 

Ubiquiti AirMax PicoStation

https://www.ubnt.com/airmax/picostationm/

 

^ Same company I was going to link to.

It's overkill for your application, but we use their AirGrid devices to link multiple buildings together. You could put up a pair of those, and then a local WAP in the barn. They are insanely cheap:




A spare one I have in the office:

 

+1 to Ubiquiti!

--Ferdi

 

I think I'm figuring things out. Since this is an ongoing and not time-sensitive project, I think for this year, I think I'm going to just try getting a more powerful signal out of the house... which means one of the various Ubiquiti products you guys like. Ialso found the Engenius brand which appears to be similar. I like the idea of just plugging in a CAT5 cable and mounting the Picostation on a pole to get a more powerful signal outside the house. Lots of reviews of guys saying they pick up signals at a few hundred yards away... plenty for an intitial upgrade experiment.

Getting the signal out to other parts of the Ranch is definitely something I'm looking at... looks like the market for easy/cheap wifi distribution is big enough that there are actually easy/cheap solutions. Thanks for the advice.

Love the advice, thanks guys.

 

yeah at my old office (~2006) we moved down the street to a larger space.

they used an extender before the T1 (or whatever) line got installed from the old space to new. Worked very well.

 

I can't even get reliable telephone at my house, much less internet.

I bought the lot adjacent to our house, and Comcast crosses the corner of that lot, so I got them to provide cable at that pole, and set up two Ubiquiti Loco M5's. These cost about $75 per side. I get solid 55mbps through the radio link.

The Ubiquiti stuff is the best I've ever worked with. It just runs forever.

 

Barn is a steel building. It is hard to get any radio signal through the steel walls. Our industrial park has a cell tower on the site. No signal inside the metal buildings.

 

so you can just take one of those airgrid dealies and point it at your shed/garage/local beer garden and set up a WAP a couple blocks away?

 

Yes.

A pair of airgrid devices, aimed at one another, function just like a very long Ethernet cable made of air. You use them to connect two Ethernet switches together over a great distance.

 

As Joe mentioned, you need a pair of them to make the link. This is because the transmitter in your laptop/tablet/phone/whatever isn't strong enough.

--Ferdi

 

Oh I get it. You could receive the signal but ... not send one back.

Sounds like a fun project for this would be to invent a hat on which you mount a small pantilt and one of these with a means of having it always point itself to your base station--which also has a pantilt. Then you could just wander around and have wifi all over.

Of course the other guy on the network would get no love.