OT- Getting WI-FI to work in your shop

[crossthread]

This came up in a thread a year or two ago. There was a long discussion on how to get internet access to work in a remote shop without running cable. A lot of high tech terms were thrown around with no real specifics so hopefully this will simplify your life if you need to do this. My shop is 550 feet from my house and I did not want to run CAT 5 that far. I remember a lot of suggestions but nothing conclusive on what would work and what would not. I just want to say here what I did and that it worked great. I bought a Hawking HA12W directional antenna that is about a foot high and four inches wide and sticks to the inside of my window in the house with provided suction cups. It plugs directly into my Verizon modem. No power supply or anything. You just unscrew the little rubber duck antenna that comes with the modem and plug in the Hawking antenna. I have it pointed in the general direction of my shop which is completely hidden by trees by the way. On the other end I placed a Netgear WN2000RPT range extender in a window of the shop. The range extender is about 8" tall and 1.5" thick. The only connection on the shop end is the plug in power supply that came with. The range extender just picks up the very weak signal from the antenna in my house ( I got absolutely no connection without doing this) and re-transmits a strong signal in the shop. I had the whole thing up and going in 30 minutes. Total cost was about $100 which is probably less then the CAT 5 cable alone and one heck of a lot easier. I got both items at Best Buy which is probably one of the more expensive places to shop but not knowing if it would really work or not I wanted the take back policy within 15 days that they offer. It works great and I highly recommend this if you need WI-FI in your remote shop, outhouse or whatever.

 

[Drroaster]

What did the setup cost you

 

[Greg White]

Thank you for posting this data.
Gw

 

[adama]

At 550ft your beyond cat 5's rated spec. it may still work to some degree but would be well below std rated speed levels (would have to have a switch or similar mid way along the cable to get normal rated specs). Your really into either a radio link like you have or potentially fiber optic territory. But then theres little point haveing a link to your router that much faster than your broad band connection anyhow :-)

 

[Shadon]

Now for added fun, rename your amplifier "NSA surveillance van #3"

I doubt anyone will be trying to log in without permission

 

[RebHawk]

But then theres little point haveing a link to your router that much faster than your broad band connection anyhow :-)

Unless you transfer a lot of files around internally, in which case it makes perfect sense to have as fast a link as possible internally. Examples are backing up your computers to a central server or disk on your local network nightly.

Cheers,
--Hawk

 

[crossthread]

Hi Hawk, I haven't done any fancy speed tests or anything but the internet connection in my shop seems as fast as the one in my house. Drroaster, as I said in my original post, it was around $100.

 

[Mike_]

Yeah, the internet speed will probably be the same but only because your internet connection probably doesn't saturate the bandwidth of the wireless link you have. If you get to moving files around internally on your network you will see some speed loss because you are not using the slow internet link then. The computers in my shop back up nightly, so I ran cat 7 gigabit wired access points through the shop. Over Wifi alone they wouldn't finish backing up before work in the morning. I really like the cat7 stuff, the extra shielding seemed to help a lot over cat 5e.

But for your setup and the reasons already mentioned above (too long of a run for any copper cat5/5e/7) the way you chose to handle it is best. I did something similar at a buddy's house a while back. If you are really close to the range of a standard wireless router you can even make your own directional antenna (on both ends of course) using aluminum foil!

https://www.google.com/search?q=wif...q=wifi+parabolic+reflector+&safe=off&tbm=isch