Looking for a High Power Desktop PCI/USB Card for wireless AP (Master Mode)
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Hello everyone,
I was just wondering if anyone would happen to know of any good high powered PCI/USB cards that i could use to build a list for those having issues with choosing the right card which supports AP (Master Mode) mode. I am also asking this because i have set up pfsense as a wifi hotspot which i rent out to a neighbour about 100 feet beside my house, but at my neighbors I only get 18% signal strength. I have setup their network using an old WRT54G V8 router with DDWRT as a Repeater Bridge which connects to my pfsense router. (All my neighbors computers connect to the WRT54G) Now i am looking for a nice high powered PCI/USB card that i can use which might improve the signal strength. If not i am willing to setup another computer with pfsense to act as a repeater since i have old parts that i can use to build it, and i will use the high powered PCI/USB wireless cart to relay the signals using a bridge of two wireless interfaces. Any help would be appreciated since i would like to help others with these issues.
John
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You might be better served by using a directional aerial and pointing it towards your neighbour's WiFi router.
"Standard" devices use an omnidirectional aerial. These radiate the wireless signal evenly in all directions. If you use a directional aerial it increases the effective radiated power in one direction and reduces it in most other directions. This reduces the likelihood your WiFi will interfere with other neighbours.
There is a number of cheap WiFi cards with detachable aerials capable of acting as APs. The detachable aerial could be replaced by an external directional aerial such as a panel aerial.
You may not even need to boost the signal. If you can get 1Mbps data rate over the WiFi link and your max download speed from the Internet is 1Mbps then boosting the data rate of the WiFi link is not going to increase your neighbours download speeds.