Extending wifi range with yagi aerials

Phaser

Phaser

Phaser

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I've got a garage about half a mile from my house which I want to get connected to the net, with my house being fairly close and almost in line of sight I thought I could just extend the range of my router by connecting it to a yagi aerial, and at the garage end use a wifi card also connected to a yagi.

So the aerials came yesterday, I thought id just be able to unscrew the plastic aerial on the router and screw the new aerial on however i've taken off the plastic aerial and i'm just left with a wire, which is too thick to thread into the new one...Any ideas?!

I'm hoping the wifi card will be just a case of screwing the new one, but I doubt i'd be able to pick up the signal from my router at home with just that aerial, i'd need one on the router end too....

:confused:
 
Edit: Don't think you're meant to thread that wire into the aerial, the connector on the end looks like one of those screw types, same as what goes into cable modems/boxes etc. Need to see if there's a connector what I thread the wire into, and then screw that onto the aerial I think?
 
Will probably be F-Type or N-type on the YAGI. The router could be anything depending on the model! Could be N-Type, F type, RP-SMA etc etc. You can luckily get cables that convert between all of these types, but you do lose some signal in the process!

What card have you ordered? Thats probably going to be MMCX if its PCMCIA, RP-SMA at biggest if its USB and thats only if the aerial can be removed...
 
I see, I presumed they'd all have some sort of universal fit lol. :o The yagis seem to be a female N type connection, not sure on the router, I unscrewed the plastic aerial and like i said i'm just left with a bit of trailing wire. It's a Netgear MR814v2 :)

Not seen the card yet - it's just an old one a mates got laying around.
 
Looks like that was never meant to have its single antenna replaced by an end user, and that bit of wire you've exposed is just the antenna's element.

Putting something highly directional on it and pointing it out your house also will most likely result in little / no coverage inside the building (funnily enough).

Seriously do yourself a favour, buy some proper external 5Ghz bridges and mount them outside and point them at each other to do the link.
 
Yeah I think you're right. How much are we talking for the 5GHz bridges? I know this setup works as my friend has a similar setup over a greater distance too. The aerials cost me next to nothing so buying another router which allowed me to plug in the yagi wouldn't be a great deal.
 
Well you can buy some non-descript OEM sort of kit for about £60 an end, though I get the feeling that is probably more than you want to spend.

Another way you could do this would be to use something like a Linksys WRT54GL and some 'pig-tail' cable to turn the sockets on the router into the right sort but then you have to consider cable loss etc. and the cost of it - if you're planning on running a few meters of it up into your roof or whatever or to get the antenna outside you may as well have just bought something designed for the job.

And again you have the problem that you're then taking one channel of a diversity system and effectively making it useless. Just a bad idea IMO as it will likely only serve to make the performance / coverage of the wireless in your house worse.
 
I don't mind spending £150 or so for a "proper" setup, could you give me some model/ranges that you'd recommend me looking at? I came across the Ubiquiti NanoStation M5 AirMax but at around £250 that's out of budget.
 
Worth noting that a mate and I got a single Ubiquiti card with a YAGI attached to link to a standard AP over 2 miles away. Link quality wasnt great, but it linked.

Linksys make bridges which are just basically holders for PCMCIA cards, you may well be able to swap the cards inside for better cards if you found the link quality to be poor. They have RP-SMA connectors so you wont have a problem with antenna connections!
 
DRZ said:
Linksys make bridges which are just basically holders for PCMCIA cards
Click to expand...

Quite a few do that. When I had a DG834N in bits that was how it worked, although the card was inside a metal shield of sorts.
You'd likely have issues with finding a driver that worked with it though.
 
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