Wireless network setup question

Hi there, I have 3 EnGenius EOA3630 units that I want to use to give myself wireless coverage over a large area of my property. What is the best way to set these up. The manual mentions access point, wds, repeater modes etc but none of the seem to match my situation.

At the moment I have one unit plugged into the router at my house and operating in access point mode and the other 2 units are operating in repeater mode but the connections seem unreliable, is there a better way to configure these?

 

All of them need to be set as Access Points. A repeater is used as a "bridge" to get a connection somewhere farther. A repeater basically takes a signal and sends it to the next point, which could be another repeater or access point.

 

Imagine three antenna's set up in a triangle where the main access point is at 6 o'clock and the two other antenna's are at 12 and 3.

When I set the antenna at 12 to be an access point it disappeared out of sight and I had to go and hard wire into it to set it back to being a repeater so I could see it again. This would indicate that this antenna cannot see the one at 6.

In this case then, would it make sense to have 6 be an access point, 3 be a repeater and 12 be an access point (but presumably I would have to manually define the connection between it and the repeater)?

 

And imagine that you have not set up your network properly. You need to set them all to access points. Which means a cat-5e or cat-6 ran from the main router to each access point. If you can not run cat-5e or cat-6 to each access point, you will need to use a couple of "Repeaters" to bridge the connection from the router to the Access point, or access points if more than one. Now of course the great thing about repeaters, are if they are set up properly, you can hop on them to use their signal. http://www.wifirepeater.net/what-is-a-wifi-repeater/

http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt...ter+work&fr=att-portal&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8

How do you think that police can call back to their dispatch, when running around the city? They use repeaters on buildings, so that the signal will hop back to the main radio.

 

If everything was peachy I wouldn't be posting on here asking for help now would I?

Running a cable to each access point is not an option.

All I am trying to establish is how to set them up to work. As I explained I originally setup A6 as an access point and A3 and A12 as repeaters and could connect all over the site but it wasn't stable. I then changed A12 to be an access point and it fell out of sight. I had to go and plug an RJ45 into the other side of the POE injector to see it and change the settings as I couldn't connect to it wirelessly at all.

Changing A3 and A12 back to being access points I suspect would give me the same issues unless there is something I need to change in the access point settings.

I have another site where I have 4 internal EnGenius Wireless Access Point/Client Bridges set up with the only hardwired antenna being an Access Point and the other 3 all acting as repeaters and there are no connection issues there at all so my logic isn't totally flawed.

 

If the connections are unreliable, I would have to say that distance, height of the units, structures, lay of the land have a lot to do. Did you ever do a site survey to make sure that the property can be covered. If you haven't, that would be the first thing, then second would be to determine best type of antenna, to allow connection.

There are a couple of good WISP forums out on the web, you may want to hit them up regarding your issue, since they deal with this stuff on a daily basis.

 

Hi,

What do you mean by "unreliable"? Do you have problems establishing connections? Do the connections drop? Are they slow? Which connections seem unreliable? Connections to the repeaters from devices? Connections between the repeaters and the access point? All of them?

You can get unreliable WiFi connections for any number of reasons. As has been suggested, a site survey would be the first place to start, to identify sources of interference, at the very least.

What WiFi settings are you using on each device? Channels? Are you bridging them on the same channel that the SSID accepts connections on?

I'm certainly no WiFi expert, but I just read the manual for the EnGenius EOA3630 and, based on your layout, you'd probably want to use WDS Bridging, and configure them as follows: A6 talks to A3, which which talks to A12? And either A6 or A12 (whichever is in your house), would be the AP, and the other 2 would be WDS Bridges talking to each other?

Other thoughts: You need to be sure that the areas of overlap are such that when a client device sees more than one of the access points it will always pick only one, generally based on signal strength... this should allow them to roam seamlessly across the entire coverage area.

Hope this helped a little

Regards,

dj

 

The connection at the house is pretty much constant so no problem there as far as I can see.

All three units are operating in the default channels which are all channel 3.

Unreliable means a couple of things; firstly the EnGenius locator tool cannot always see all three devices. When I run a ping count of 20 pings on each of the 3 devices, the house comes back all 20 under <1ms, A3 comes back 100% with a max of 6ms and A12 comes back with 80% success rate but connection speeds of up to 23ms.

I like the sound of the WDS bridging but will I be able to connect at any point along the chain?

 

Use InSSIDer or Chanalyzer from Metageek.net to do a site survey. Channel 3 may not be the best to use.

 

Hi,

Have you verified that there's nothing else that could be interfering? There's channel overlap issues to consider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

There's also contention by channel to deal with, and again, there's no way to know if this is an issue without a site survey.

http://www.ekahau.com/products/heatmapper/overview.html should get you started. I haven't used it, but it appears that it would help.

This tells me that there's a communication problem, but since you don't state where you're running the pings from, how far the devices are from one another, how they're placed, what the terrain is like, and haven't done a site survey (Hint, hint), it's impossible to narrow it down any further than that.

Also, I'd say that ping times in the double-digits are fine. Even triple digits would be acceptable, depending on the environment. Again, without a site survey (are you starting to see a pattern here? ) this is all guesswork, and you really can't effectively troubleshoot without knowing the environment.

Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_distribution_system

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_repeater to compare.

Honestly, it doesn't sound as though you're going to be able to make this "just work". You really need to take the time and do a site survey so that you know what you're dealing with.

Regards,

dj

 

Here are the answers to some of the questions asked.

Ping tests are being run from the PC in my office which has a wired connection to the same router that A6 is wired to.

A6 and A12 are about 200m apart with clear line of site between the two. A3 is halfway between the two, maybe 20m off to the side with clear line of site between all points.

The site is an exposed point of land with nearest house being 250-300m south of A6.

I'm downloading the site survey as I type and will post results soon.

 

I downloaded and ran inSSIDER from my Asus XP Netbook and inSSIDer showed me the following;

a) nothing else is operatingon channel 3 apart from my three antennas
b) the amplitude fluctuates between -90dB and -75dB

the test were run indoor a distance of maybe 15 feet from A6.

I also plugged in an old ISP supplied router and set that to run on channel 11. That also appeared with an amplitude in the same range at a distance of maybe 3 feet from the netbook.

 

-75 to -90 is way too low. You will have to try different antennas, and most likely have to get them higher.

 

That's the strange thing, they all seem to be extremely low, even the Seimens router/gateway thats 3 feet from my laptop is low yet at another site an identical piece of equipment hovers around -30/-35dB

 

Then it would be a Laptop issue. Try an external type WiFi adapter on your laptop. USB or other type of adapter.

 

An identical router at a different location registers -30dB on the same netbook, this proves the issue is not the netbook, also I have tried the same app with the same network hardware on a different laptop and received the same results, again proving its not the netbook wifi adaptor.

 

Then I would possibly be looking at orientation of the antenna on the one giving -75 to -90.