I am trying to upgrade an existing wireless network at my house. I am running off of a wireless broadband 256K connection. The company furnished a Belkin wireless G router, now 1 1/2 years old.

I am trying to send a signal from my upstairs loft area to a R panel metal clad building about 200' away. I want to get streaming audio (radio).

I can get a weak signal on my laptop standing in front of the shop (which is in front of the house) and even just inside the front door. Laptop has a Netgear Rangemax card.

So I went and bought the latest and greatest Linksys Ultra N Rangemax router and a music bridge (have not opened yet) I get about one bar more signal on the laptop.

I went back to Circuit City and talk to their guru. He starts off with "I am not calling you stupid but you need to get one of our techs out there to set it up properly. If you use the factory software, you will not get near the range and it will be finicky about talking to other brands of equipment. It needs to to be set it up generically under Windows and let our techs set it up."

I find it hard to fathom the product is "factory crippled" to reduce it range while being billed as "Rangeplus"

Any thoughts on what he said or what I need to do?

 

Well some one else maybe able to help you more with this but from everthing that my wife has told me(yeh she is the guru ,how else can I afford my toys). Trying to send a signal into that type of a building from that far away is going to be hard. The metal panels act as a sheild to your signal and will make it very hard to get any type of reception, kind of like getting into an elevator.

She said the best bet would be to try and get something to rebroadcast your signal, but it would have to recieve the signal outside of the building. Don't know what type that you could use or if they make a remote mount for the antena that you could run through he wall and do it that way. She said that she would ask aroud and see if anyone she knows has any ideas and I'll post them later if no one has better solutions for you.

Hope this helps also might want to see if there guys at circut city might have any Ideas on that also.

 

locate your router in a central location.
the longer aftermarket antennae may help.
Linksys is a better choice of routers. I a linksys router and I dont loose a signal until I get to the other side of the block.
200' is pushing it on range. You might try setting up another router connected with an ethernet cable to the existing router.

 

A lot of the wireless equipment has brand specific default settings that won't play well with other brands. That said, I don't know of anything that needs one of their "experts" to wring decent range out of it.

You can usually set wireless Winders up using its own so-called wireless zero configuration or you can use the vendor provided software. I find wireless zero tends to work better than the vendor provided stuff.

Wireless range limitations can be caused by nearby objects, tangles of cables near an antenna, interference that the user doesn't even know exists, studs in the wall, any kind of metal in the signal's path, household wiring, and lots of other variables.

From this distance, it is almost impossible to try to give you any advice beyond suggesting you study up on wireless networking and locate the wireless router as close to the metal building as possible. Play with its antenna orientation, too.

 

Also, dont forget, that wireless networking operates at 2.4GHz. the same frequency as cordless phone and many other consumer wireless devices.