wifi outdors booster

Hi!

I have a Zyxel modem/router from provider which works for us. I am using Ethernet/WiFi and my wife just WiFi. But WiFi is not good about 50 m outside of the house. We have a camper on our yard where our visitors sleep and is about 300m away and there are not WiFi signal.
Can anyone recommended not expensive WiFi booster which should work, please?
Thank you.
 
A different option is to replace the antenna. Some WiFi adaptor have a coaxial socket, often it is SMA or reverse-SMA. You could attach an antenna with some gain instead of an omnidirectional antenna. A very popular one is build out of the Pringles box. Just look for "Pringles" and "Antenna".

But if WiFi does not work well 50m outside of the house it might not be enough to replace one antenna. If possible place the antennas that they see each other without any obstacles.
 
I'm not a big fan of wireless extenders, because at the end of the day you're fighting with the access point(s) over the same radio spectrum.

Do you have AC power at the camper? I've used powerline adapters instead with good results. They're limited to 100Mbps or so, but this is often good enough.
 
You might take a look at the TP-Link CPE510 (https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/outdoor-radio/cpe510/#overview).

It is a 5 GHz very directional access point. I used a couple of them to run Ethernet to a house we were renting across the street with good success. That is probably a little less than 300 m, but the doc says something about it being optimized for up to 15 Km.

You will want to put a regular access point in the camper and connect it to the CPE510 at that end.

I really like these devices. I used another pair to bring the network to an outbuilding that we had our offices in. Although I prefer wired Ethernet whenever I can use it, sometimes it is just too much work to bury a cable, and these devices are the next best thing.
 
I agree with Jose about crowded 5GHz spectrum.

If you have clear line-of-sight and power at the camper, have a look at 60GHz equipment like these:

I am looking for MikroTik 1 Gbps but as not good in networking I am not sure how easy are settings. Do you have any experience with MikroTik, please?
Thank you.
 
Do you have power at the remote site at the camper or anywhere between those 300m?

With point to point dish will be the best option but it will be expensive as you will need another AP for the end clients. You may want to try first with the dirty cheap Cudy AX3000 outdoor aps but you need to put several of them like 100m away and you need to power them.
 
Do you have power at the remote site at the camper or anywhere between those 300m?

With point to point dish will be the best option but it will be expensive as you will need another AP for the end clients. You may want to try first with the dirty cheap Cudy AX3000 outdoor aps but you need to put several of them like 100m away and you need to power them.
Yes, we have a power in the camper
 
Yes, we have a power in the camper
If the camper is supplied by a cable from your home, then powerline adaptors might be an option, too. This adaptors can couple some RF spectrum modulated with the Ethernet data on the mains supply of a house. Unfortunately they are RF hogs, mainly because the mains supply has never been designed to distribute RF signals. Usually they claim to meet some FCC purity specs, but in practice the setup will disturb reception of radio signals, at least on short wave.
 
I am looking for MikroTik 1 Gbps but as not good in networking I am not sure how easy are settings.
I use a pair of the Mikrotik Wireless Wire boxes (not the dishes) for a full 1Gb/s connection but only over a distance of 30m.
I'm told they can be used over much greater distances but I don't have any experience with that. Using the "dish" models might be a safer choice for 300m.

The WW boxes come in pairs that are pre-configured to talk to each other. Plug and play but the Mikrotik GUI is a bit "strange" at first.

There are a couple of things to be careful of:
a) You must have good line-of-sight for 60GHz kit. Trees and bushes will seriously degrade the signal.
b) Rain will also affect the signal but by how much is a difficult question. How heavy is the rain and over what distance?

Hope that helps.
 
Thank you. I will try. There are two unit: one in the house I connect to the modem (ethernet) and the other in camper and connect through WiFi? Am I correct?
 
The cheap and easy way is to use powerline adapters.

The thing about powerline adapters is that they like to be on the same circuit.
Running through circuit breakers or even power boards can easily prevent them from working at all.
Worth a try though.
 
Just fixed your thread title (buster->booster).

You may set up two small WIFI APs in the focal point of some (old) satellite dishes which you point at each other. I have heard good things from this out of the australian outback. There, your garden shed may be miles away from the porch.

edit: Didn't see biggsys post, that is the comercial version.
 
I agree with Jose about crowded 5GHz spectrum.

If you have clear line-of-sight and power at the camper, have a look at 60GHz equipment like these:

Interesting. For now, I am stickping with the CPE510s, because I own four of them and they have worked well so far, but if I ever need a longer distance, I will check out the Mikrotik devices, especially since they seem to be cost-competitive with the CPE510s.

Thanks for pointing them out.
 
Powerline adapters suck.

You need to dig in an all-weather Ethernet cable.
Well, yes, that would be loads better, but you got to dig a trench, lay the cable, fill the trench... a lot more work and a lot more expensive. I was going for the quick and easy fix!

I suppose you could suspend a cable from a galvanised catenary, although 300 m will need a number of poles. You'd need a few of these.
Either way it sounds like a lot of work! 😄
 
Thank you. I will try. There are two unit: one in the house I connect to the modem (ethernet) and the other in camper and connect through WiFi? Am I correct?
They both have an RJ45 cable ethernet port at the bottom, you can see it in this picture. So in the house you need a cat 5 cable between your router and the house adapter. At the other end, you just take another cat 5 cable from the adapter to your PC or laptop. Your data then gets transferred over the existing mains cable between the house and the trailer.

So it depends what the equipement in the trailer is. If it's something like a modern laptop with no built-in RJ45 port, then you need a little usb to RJ45 ethernet dongle. But if you need wifi in the trailer, then use one of the old wifi routers you've got lying around and connect the cable to one of the RJ45's on it's built-in switch. I haven't tried that latter configuration myself, I just use cable, but it should work. Then you will have a local wifi access point in the trailer.

Anyway, that's a quick and easy thing to try setting up, and it doesn't cost much. You can probably get the power adapters used on ebay if you don't want to buy new.

These things do work, I've used them myself between the house and the shed, over about 10m, you get roughly 100 MB/s which is good enough for most things. I noticed you said the trailer is about 300m away, that's at the limit of the range these things claim to support, so ymmv. Of course you could try them out and if they don't work over that distance then send them back for a refund. It won't take long to try them out. :)

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There is another option to get internet access in the trailer, which is to use either a 4G mobile phone as a hotspot, or to buy a standalone 4G hub; if you're in the UK you can get one like this https://3g.co.uk/home-broadband/three/4g-hub. Of course it might cost more than extending your house network, and depends if you've got 4G coverage where the trailer is. If you've got a 4G android phone you can test whether it might work by setting it up as a hotspot in the trailer, for example see this https://www.androidauthority.com/mobile-hotspot-setup-631280/

I have done this in the car on vacation, take laptop with me and use the mobile as a hotspot to connect the laptop to the internet. Yes, it works with freebsd, too. It may be a more expensive option than extending your home broadband of course, because you're using mobile data, although if you've got an unlimited data contract, that's not a problem. But if this is only used occasionally in the trailer when you have guests staying, it might be worth considering. It might be a lower speed connection than home broadband, but if it's just for a bit of web browsing, chat apps, email... it's plenty good enough.
 
The thing about powerline adapters is that they like to be on the same circuit.
Running through circuit breakers or even power boards can easily prevent them from working at all.
Worth a try though.
Good point, if you've got something like an ELCB protecting the power line to the trailer, the power line network adapters might not work. But It's worth a try, you can always send them back if they don't work.
 
If you're going to dig in cable it might as well be optical fiber. Sure, you need adapters at each end but cheap compared to trenching, etc, etc. Also a good insulator when the camper gets hit by lightning. :)
 
Can anyone recommended not expensive WiFi booster which should work, please?
There are some sites that describe DIY long range WiFi antennas. Like a sattelite dish, but with a WiFi receiver/dongle. In the past I experimented with a tube formed antenna and reached over 300m to pick up access points. Don't know if it could establish a reliable connection.

If the remote spot is on the main power line as your home you cold use a powe line extender. The Fritz!PowerLine 1260E I have works well. Passing to a different electrical circuit group however reduces the connection speed. Therefor I made a 20m ethernet cable to the back of my house.
 
300m won't work via WLAN - even if you put up an AP with very high power antennas, the problem are still (as always) the clients which won't be able to put out a strong enough signal. Yes, 300m is at or within the "theoretical" range of some WLAN gear, but only under laboratory conditionsl and at absolute garbage signal strenght and hence unusable bandwidth.

Copper also won't work reliable and/or at any usable speeds over such distance. 100-120m are OK, 150m are usually already a gamble even with cat7; at least from my experience within commercial buildings - so for a lone cable in the ground you *might* get away with 150m or even 200m, but anything above that I doubt will work. Let alone the effort and cost to dig in a cable over 300m at proper depth (>0.5m).
If burying a cable/duct really is no big deal for you at that site, if any, use fiber. If you don't want to put a switch on the remote end, there are media converters available even for outdoor use which are relatively cheap.

Powerline is junk. They don't even work at any meaningful speeds (if at all) within the same building, let alone over such distances. Camping gear also isn't particularly known for being perfectly in spec and RF-conformant, so that stuff will put all kind of nasty interferences and noise into your power lines, further minimizing the chance to get any data signal through.

If you can get a direct line of sight to the remote side (e.g. by putting up a rigid pole), I'd just use directional radio. Nowadays they are widely available, even at "end user-friendly" price points e.g. from mikrotik. Those are 'sufficiently reliable' to be used as a "fire&forget" solution. Their OS is still an absolute shitshow - so keep it as simple as possible or don't touch it at all to keep your sanity, they come pre-configured anyways and will provide a transparent layer 2 bridge.
We run a bridge to a remote storage building over ~350m with a pair of mikrotik wireless wire nRay dishes (the cube pro weren't in stock anywhere back then or we would have used those, as they have a 5GHz fallback). There's only an AP and SIP-DECT antenna at the other end for a single workplace that is only occupied for a few hours per week, so I couldn't justify throwing a bigger budget at this and hence I had to go with mikrotik...

You have to properly adjust them via the web interface (the LED indicators at the back are junk and don't work) and make sure the RJ45 jacks are not fully pushed in by the strain relief nut or else some pins will loose connection and it will either drop to 100mbit or completely cease to work. This is true for almost all mirkotik outdoor gear - thankfully I received this tip from a friend who has to work a lot with mikrotik and they spend multiple days figuring this out because as soon as you unscrew the cap nut all pins will properly connect again...
Once they are dialed in to <0.5° on both axes on each side, connection is perfectly reliable and fast (1Gbps in both directions simultaneously) and I didn't have to touch it ever since (~9 months now).
According to zabbix monitoring, every few weeks one of the dishes will just randomly reboot, but from what I've heard this is normal/expected for mikrotik and it usually happens outside of the time when the office at the building is occupied (or even normal work hours) I really don't care...

There are other vendors available, but they are at 2-5x the price tag (and even more...), so if budget is tight you are pretty much stuck with mikrotik. The next best "prosumer" vendor woud be ubiquiti, which start at roughly twice the price for their directional radio solutions, but I'm not sure if they also have 60GHz available now. Especially in more crowded areas and/or if there are a lot of plastic routers that don't respect reserved 5GHz channels (i.e. most fritzboxes) you absolutely don't want to use the 2.4GHz or 5GHz band for long distance connections. Also the mm-Wave connections usually have much higher bandwidht and hence will still deliver usable speeds even if there is some noise.
 
Interesting stuff, 300 m is quite a long distance. I've had powerline working here over around 10m, but maybe I was just lucky, I'm sure it depends on how bad the mains cabling is. So maybe the 300 m range that tp-link claim in their ad. is "if-you-are-very-lucky"-ware! It does sound rather a long distance.
 
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