Recently my wireless system in the house got pretty tired and it appeared that my repeater had died. Another problem was that a wireless network I'd never heard of before has been stepping all over my somewhat weak wireless-it's OK here but very tired at the other end of the house-which is where I do my amp work and I depend on a computer there to host my library of schematics and answer a few questions.
In a way we should have expected this.
In the 1920s and 1930s many radios were regenerative or had a regenerative feature that would rebroadcast whatever they were tuned to. Remember all that movie schtick with the nazis locating clandestine radio sets via a loop antenna on top of a bread van? That was because of regeneration. It was fine if you lived out on the farm but in an apartment house with multiple families listening to different stations the problem was real.
In the 1930s Philco developed the first remote control for radios that they made-premium sets to be sure. You could sit in your favorite chair and dial in whatever station you liked, but if your upstairs neighbors in the apartment had a similar radio with remote you might be changing their station as well as your own.
The operative principle here is competing signals swamping each other-stepping on them as the CB radio aficionados called it.
Until the other day the downstairs shop computer chores were being handled by an elderly Dell workstation that had been built up out of junk parts, cheap crap from Newegg and the deceased CompUSA chain, and the carcass which I acquired complete with a Pentium 4 processor for fifty bucks at the Iowa State University surplus outlet. It did the job if you didn't ask too much of it at one time.
A friend of mine offered a relatively more advanced HP tower in exchange for some amp work and we made the swap-kinda like Francis Gary Powers and the bridge more or less, exchanging prisoners at midnight.
I spent today getting it up to date but I still had the problem with a weak signal and my seven dollar Chinese wireless LAN card newly housed in the new-ish computer wasn't liking dealing with a weak signal. Sorting out the audio and video were relatively simple as the new tower had both functions built in.
The computer is the newer SATA format pinout so I could not use my nifty 500gb hard drive, DVD drives and my floppy disk drive. I guess the era of the 3.5 inch floppy diskette is finished around here more's the pity. I think I may be able to repurpose the power supply as the connections look similar.
To continue the thread, I'd purchased a Seaidea repeater on fleabay for about twelve dollars and it was this one. What it is is a simple receiver-transmitter that detects and amplifies weak signals before rebroadcasting them.
But you have to tell it what to detect and rebroadcast first.
So I still had it but it became apparent that the repeater had to be configured to work properly. This unit came with a good set of instructions and I won't bore you with the gory details.
What's required is to use your computer to address the repeater via a LAN cable, configure it, and you're done. I simply connected the device to my wireless router via the short LAN cable that the fine folks from Seaidea, the people who made this device provided.
Then, you take your newly recognized and configured repeater and put it somewhere about half the distance to the place where you want to connect.
It worked terrifically well. I now have five bars throughout the house and with any luck I am stomping all over my neighbor's wireless even as we speak.
If this is you, it's easy and all you have to do is make sure that your computer is set to recognize the wi fi repeater rather than your original network when logging on.
UPDATE:
Nothing's ever as simple as it appears on the surface. Because we were making such fine progress on the home network front we decided to secure our wireless system from freeloaders and moochers of all kinds.
After properly addressing the router to institute a security protocol, not only could I not log onto anything but my nifty Seaidea repeater quit working.
Several hours of bodging revealed that I had to first reset my new cable modem that Mediascam foisted off on me. In order to do that I had to wipe our whatever it had as settings and reestablish that. When that was done the same process had to be repeated with the elderly Cisco wireless router . Then, and only then, could I get the repeater configured to work properly.
Of course there was a benefit in all this because all that time the cable modem had been trying to establish a phone connection because I'd plugged the LAN cable into the phone port. That slowed things to a crawl until I got that figured out in the process of all this other silly shit.
All this took a good part of the day. It's knowledge I had no interest in learning and my spouse does not understand that at nearly seventy I do not want to waste time mastering knowledge that is of no earthly profit to me.
Of course it was after all that that the Tivo decided it did not like the new security settings and I'll have to contact Mediascam on Monday for the proper MoCA encryption key to make the search feature work properly. That means another morning shot doing battle with dunces and morons to acquire knowledge that is of no interest to me.
I mean, who gives a flying f**k what MoCA is or does?
Thanks, everyone. No one ever said.
Of course I missed the opportunity to rename our wireless network FBIvan3.
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