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Need AC3200 range extender with removable antennas
I just hooked up a Nighthawk X6 R8000 router in the house. For decades I've used various range extenders to get Internet over to my office which is in a separate building on the farm. Currently I have a Netgear EX63200. It "works" but is only AC1200. Transferring files between house and office could be better.
To scale the great distance I have this antenna outside.
Outdoor antenna for officeAs I said, I've been doing this for decades. Even wrote this blog post about setting it up back in 2011.
What I'm finding with most range extender and "mesh" products made today is that they are really cheap. Pressed-on antenna. Yes, they turn, but you cannot unscrew them to connect outdoor antenna. Adding insult to injury, most "outdoor mesh" products, besides being incredibly expensive, only work with a more expensive proprietary router. Up until now I have always been able to mix and match.
So, I need a "mesh" or range extender unit that has removable antenna and provides AC3200 or better.
Thanks
6 Replies
If it was me, I'd stop messing with range extenders and switch to a system designed for that like netgear airbridge.
You get a 2 pack of them and put one on the house and one on the garage. Then you connect the one in the garage to an access point (which your older one would work and be quite a bit faster hooked up this route). This will give that house/garage connection a much higher starting point for speeds versus using an extender.
WBC502 | Wireless AirBridge | NETGEAR Support
I was reading through your post on what you did and didn't see a specific distance or that actual speeds that you're getting.
Was just checking and it doesn't seem as if there's much in stock anywhere for the netgear airbridge.
There are other systems that tend to be cheaper and have similar performance.
Just look on amazon for point to point systems. I'd look for the 5ghz based systems as they'll have higher performance.Thanks for your feedback. Not really a solution. Without an external antenna, there is no way to get signal. No windows in the garage I use as my office face the house. I built this thing stout! 7/16ths Aspenite (sp?) on both sides of the wall studs. I
Distance is well over 50 yards. Never measured it, but this is a farm homestead, not a city dwelling. Could be 80 yards.
Range extenders have worked well for me over the past 2+ decades. I've been in IT over 30 years and had to deal with this when all we had was dial-up, then CradlePoint things and on.
Yes, "mesh" is the new wowsy stuff everybody is trying to sell. None of them have removable antenna so you can hook up external antenna. Almost all of them require a matched router from the same vendor at a massive markup, and by all accounts they don't actually work. They are designed for "suburbs" not rural. Out here we have very thick walls, 5+ horse electric fans on grain/drying bins, those God-awful wind farms that completely shred the 5Mhz networking band.
They are trying to use one tower to control 5-8 square miles of these disasters and they don't play nice with the airwaves. When they are transmitting data or instructions they drown out AM 580 WILL with digital squelch and shred the band for local wifi.
Only solution I've found is to have external directional antenna pointing directly at the window in the house where the source can be found. What I need is an AC3200 version of the EX6200.
It just sits over there on that bench and works. Has the much needed removable antenna. Sadly, it is only AC1200. While that doesn't make a difference with my 25Mbps line-of-sight Internet, it does make a massive difference transferring files.
If you've only got 25mbps, that's still going to be your best bet because all netgear's stuff is moving to the internal antenna setup.
Are you trying to use the wireless from the extender in the garage as well? If so, that'll drop your speeds 50% because of how single/dual band extenders work (unless using fast lane).
But a point to point might not be a bad idea still. If there's to much interference on the 5ghz, they do make 2.4ghz based ones. And 2.4ghz should saturate 25mbps without much problem using a point to point system.
You'd mount the one in the house and the other on the pole (from your blog). Then run a wire from the one on the pole into the garage and put a simple access point there. I've actually done that before when I needed to run around 500ft and it worked fine.
