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Forum Discussion
seasoned_geek
Dec 10, 2022Guide
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 hav...
seasoned_geek
Dec 11, 2022Guide
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.
plemans
Dec 11, 2022Guru - Experienced User
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.