Wifi troubles

Recently my wife got fed up with me smoking in the house right next to the window and banished me to our garden shed. After outfitting it with a minifridge, an air conditioner and a boombox I knew it I would need the interwebz (and access to my video server) but I really didn't want to run a cable. Luckily for me I had a ton of old hardware laying around so this is what I did.

My main workspace is in my office so the DSL modem is in there hooked up to a D-Link N router broadcasting in G only. On the other side of the house in our bedroom I took an old linksys WRT54g flashed with the DD-WRT firmware and set in repeater mode. That grabs an IP off the "dlink" (192.168.2.x subnet) SSID and then hands out addresses in the 192.168.4.x range on the SSID "yard". Then I have a WRT150N with the DD-WRT firmware actually sitting inside the shed rebroadcasting the "yard" SSID in the 192.168.3.x (ya, I know, I got it backwards) under the SSID "shed".

Sitting in the shed even my built in wifi cards can get 2 bars from "dlink" network and at times I get all but the last bar green on the "yard" network. The issue I am having is that the connection is very erratic. Sometimes I can be watching both my dlink wifi cams (one on "shed" and the other on "yard"), a movie on my server and be surfing the web (mostly at night oddly enough) but this morning I couldn't even get a fast enough web connection to get hulu to even load, let alone watch.

Any ideas or am I just at the mercy of the atmosphere?

 

you have alot going on! I am not as advanced as you seem to be, so I'll give you a few of my thoughts which might not help at all lol.


You have a pretty intense network going and if you have everything going at the same time (your wifi cams on while trying to surf the web) with only 2 bars of reception you might not have a very low high speed and not enough reception for more data. So first, I would do a speedtest.net speedtest and see what speed you get. Try do do this when the speed is slow. Then, move closer to your wifi access point and check out what the speedtest comes out to. If the speed is ALOT better, you may need something for better reception. If it is the same speed, it is either because there are too many things simply running on your network or your ISP is having problems with your internet.