Mary Schroeder writes in with a common interrogation about extending Wi - Fi :

We have a workshop on our property as well as our mansion , and are trying to get the Wi - Fi signal to the shop . The shop is about 200 feet away from the house — we have pine tree trees all around us . We have two Apple routers . We have tried to figure out if a different router would avail or if we need an extender or a repeater ?

Apple ’s al-Qaida station are all designed with omnidirectional transmitting aerial , which provides the best signaling in a 360 - grade donut around them . Since Apple started shipping multi - antenna base stations in 2007 , its base place are a minuscule more clever about send and receive information further away . But they ’re fundamentally contrive to sniffle and fight signal from all around .

But it ’s relatively easy to come out a bridge or repeating firearm from another company onto a remote web and link up it into your master web .

The theme is that you have a net of one or more admittance head that ’s connected to your Internet service supplier , and then one or more distant networks that use higher - powered , directive antenna — not omnidirectional ones — to point at that main internet .

reckon on the machine , you may typically use it to connect as a client to the other meshing : it connects as if it were just another Wi - Fi machine , and bridge over the dealings to anything connected to its ethernet port , such as another base post .

This$30 item Fulcrum range extenderis one of a number of possibilities ; we have n’t done formal testing at Macworld or TechHive , so search at reviews to see how people have make out in like situations .

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