Tired of neighborhood wireless dropping you from your own network?
Your-Amish-Daddy
The heart of Texas
I live in a small town. Waco. We've all heard of it.
In the last two years, from one or two every other block, there's now 81 in a four block radius, and I doubt there are that many houses. I'm sick of their signals interfering with my fun, so I'm going to do something great, and possibly epic. I'm going to blanket the whole town (Roughly ten miles) in a 802.11G signal. I estimate it's gonna take about 3 watts (at 40 feet at 25 miliwatts for best signal). Yes, this is a giant Rogue AP attack. Out of the 81 networks, there are 77 unsecured. I guarentee I'll even get the secured ones too, since my signal will be stronger. I've alreay got the computer-side ready, built a mini-itx system just like I built my first foxbox, it's got two wireless cards, both D-Link 520V2's and all I really need is an antenna design, and the wire schematic for the plug. I'll take any advice/input.
In the last two years, from one or two every other block, there's now 81 in a four block radius, and I doubt there are that many houses. I'm sick of their signals interfering with my fun, so I'm going to do something great, and possibly epic. I'm going to blanket the whole town (Roughly ten miles) in a 802.11G signal. I estimate it's gonna take about 3 watts (at 40 feet at 25 miliwatts for best signal). Yes, this is a giant Rogue AP attack. Out of the 81 networks, there are 77 unsecured. I guarentee I'll even get the secured ones too, since my signal will be stronger. I've alreay got the computer-side ready, built a mini-itx system just like I built my first foxbox, it's got two wireless cards, both D-Link 520V2's and all I really need is an antenna design, and the wire schematic for the plug. I'll take any advice/input.
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Comments
The first is switch over to Wireless A that will pretty much guarantee you won't be seeing anyone else's signals and they won't be seeing yours either. If signal strength though is your goal you'll want Wireless N AP's and cards. They by default have the most power and greatest range.
Aside from the fact that you're going to cause issues to all the folks within your range, FCC regulations could get you into some trouble, especially if people begin reporting the problem.
A wifi card will go out and find available signals. It then will start prioritizing them in order of strongest to weakest. Once you tell it to latch on to a particular signal (normal the one in your building) it will stick with that one because it's usually the strongest.
The problem in this case is that there are sooo many signals competing that the card - while trying to do it's thing is being bombarded with other strong signals. So it's hiccuping between a couple equally strong signals before remembering that Oh Yeah I'm supposed to only use this one.
So what he's going to do in theory is put out the strongest available signal so that his card doesn't have this desire to jump around. Which should work. It's also not illegal if he doesn't go out of spec, which he shouldn't even if he's hacking the firmware and boosting the strength.
Oh one word of warning if you are boosting the signal strength you'll want to put some active cooling on your router or it'll burn out.
There's still a limit to the available spectrum. If there are 20 WAPs that can be picked up from a single point, at some point something is going to interfere.
I don't know. I think it's a really cool idea, and I'd love to see how it works out, but not at the risk of upsetting other people's wireless networks.
The less bull dog way of getting around this would be to try and find a channel that no one else is using (remember it goes from channel 2 to like 15). Then check if your network card has a setting that will tell it to not look for best possible signal strength. Close your network, make it private, don't broadcast and then boost your signal strength if you still have issues.
Keep in mind if he did absolutely nothing and put in an N class router he could still be causing interference at neighbouring houses.
Is what I'd like to say. But I can't. My god damn power supply for my small machine cought fire and toasted it. Project's back a month or more..god damn Thermaltake.
Of course this solution may not be as exciting as yours, and maybe you have already tried this without luck. But if you haven't gone down this road its worth a try.
BTW - Was thinking about a Biostar board but went with Gigabyte in my pc.
How can you do this? Most routers out of the box use their brand name as their SSID. Just go to the manufacturers site and look up how to get into the configuration interface