330 ft wire extension of wifi antenna.

[expertradioflyerdriver]

I want to acess the company wifi at my workstation in the warehouse where I work. I cannot get a signal from my workstation area. The place in the warehouse where I can get a good wifi connection on the company wifi is about 330 feet from where my computer is located at my workstation. My computer is a Acer MS vista small tower. The wifi card is a D-Link DWA-552 Xtreme N Desktop PCI Adapter. There are three antennas, four to five inches long, connected to the wifi card in the back of the computer. I can twist the antennas around in many directions. I screw in and out the antennas to connect/disconnect these antennas to the wifi card. That looks like the normal antenna connection on any wifi card.

My idea is I can unscrew one of the antennas from the wifi card. I can run a wire from my computer up along the warehouse rafters to the place where I can get good signal strength. I attach the wire to the wifi card in the back of the computer. I attach the one antenna to the end of the wire 330 ft away from my computer.

A wifi repeater or anything like that will not be allowed. If the company owner finds out that the company wifi is being rebroadcast in any way he would go ballistic. It may not make sense but this is the way it is.

Here are some questions about this idea:
1. What type of wire do I purchase to do this?
2. Where do I get your recommended wire?
3. How much will the wire cost?
4. How do I connect the wire to the wifi card and the antenna? Or maybe the correct question is how do I connect the hardware to the wire ends so I can screw in wire to wifi card and screw in antenna to end of wire?
5. Where do I get this connecting hardware?

By the way, I am 15 minute drive to Micro Center if I need things from there.
I do not need internet access at my warehouse work station to do my job so the company does not provide it. I just have a hand-me-down MS XP computer not connected to anything to do my work on. That is all I need to do my job every day. I brought in my old Vista small tower to my workstation and I will use that to connect to the internet. My goal is to listen to internet radio stations (Bloomberg radio) over the internet while I work. I have grown tired of the local broadcast radio stations.

Thank you for reading this post and thank you for any advice you can give.

 

[RogerSC]

If you can't re-broadcast then you can't use a repeater or range extender. You'd be better off running an ethernet cable of some sort and plug it into the router...but sounds kind of conspicuous...any chance to get permission to do that based on using it for listening to internet radio?

One thought, how about a using a 3G/4G modem, and use your cellular data plan to get the internet at your location? Seems like anything that you rig up to get the existing internet to your workstation is going to be a bit controversial, so you need to keep it on the downlow *smile*. Of course, you could also use your personal smartphone or tablet, but lots of data usage via cellular, I'd vote for that if you were on an unlimited data plan, though.

In lieu of an unlimited cellular data plan, maybe an MP3 player or iPod (or use your smartphone or tablet just as a player), and listen to that? Or a regular AM/FM radio?

Just a few off-the-wall thoughts *smile*.

 

[stevech]

connect two buildings using this ordinary solution: a pair of these

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833168116

A long antenna coax cable won't work due to the attenuation at 2.4GHz. That's why the above products exist.

 

[expertradioflyerdriver]

Thank you for your kind response and suggestions. The wifi broadcast unit is in the front office through one (maybe two) cinderblock walls. No way to get permission to run a direct cable to hook into the unit in the front office.

Running wires in the warehouse rafters is no problem. What gave me the idea of an extension wire for the wifi antenna is these are sold at Micro Center. Micro Center extensions are way too short. Then I have to believe I can create an extension that would be as good as the ones sold at Micro Center but 330 feet. I just have to believe this can be done.
Thank you for your help.

 

[RogerSC]

Thank you for your kind response and suggestions. The wifi broadcast unit is in the front office through one (maybe two) cinderblock walls. No way to get permission to run a direct cable to hook into the unit in the front office.

Running wires in the warehouse rafters is no problem. What gave me the idea of an extension wire for the wifi antenna is these are sold at Micro Center. Micro Center extensions are way too short. Then I have to believe I can create an extension that would be as good as the ones sold at Micro Center but 330 feet. I just have to believe this can be done.
Thank you for your help.

You can believe it if you want, but physics won't allow it due to cable attenuation over that distance. Sorry.

 

[azazel1024]

You can believe it if you want, but physics won't allow it due to cable attenuation over that distance. Sorry.

Correct. The best wire you can get for it really is LMH-400. There are larger wires, but very uncommon. On 2.4GHz the attenuation is 22.3dBi for 100m run. Unless you have uncommonly good signal there, you are unlikely to get anything with that much attenuation.

If the signal at the location would be, for example, -50dBi...a decent if not overly strong signal, it would be -72.3dBi...a very poor signal, maybe 11Mbps capable at best.

If you could run 7/8" LDF you'd only be looking at 7.5dBi of attenuation on 2.4GHz...but that is one honking big and EXPENSIVE run of antenna wire, especially if you want to try to do multiple antennas.

Your best bet is to place an access point in the rafters and connect it back to your computer using Cat5e wiring. Then you have no signal loss at all. If you need to, you could do a power over ethernet enabled access point, use a POE injector at your desktop and power the access point that way (though you might need to use Cat6 for the lower impedence to get enough juice to the AP to power it at 100m).

There is no feasibly way to have a 100m run of coaxial cable and still get a usable signal on 2.4GHz. You are talking more like a realistic 1-2m run and still get a usable signal, using resonable wiring. 5-10m would even be possible with the right wiring and not suffer toooooo much loss to make it worth while. 100m is just straight out not going to happen.

Coax for TV works just fine because the frequencies are much lower. 50-1000MHz range so a little old RG-6 cable works just fine, with attenuation ranging from about .3 to 6dBi per 100ft of length over that range and low noise from a cable TV signal...though you do have noise when its coming in over an antenna, so even with a fairly large drop, the SNR is very high on a cable TV source and even on a regular VHF/UHF...the frequency is such that you probably aren't going to have a big signal drop over the length of a resonable cable.

 

[expertradioflyerdriver]

RogerSC, stevech, azazel1024, thank you all for all of your detailed responses. Thank you so much to tell me my antenna idea won’t work. I am sure if I went to a store they would tell me to do it and sell me the wire. Now I know not to do this.

azazel1024 said:“Your best bet is to place an access point in the rafters and connect it back to your computer using Cat5e wiring.”
This sounds like a direction to pursue that would be successful. I can put an access point (I do not really know what that is) in a place near an electrical outlet near a mezzanine area near the rafters. I have to look this over and think this through.

Don’t respond to this post yet. Give me the weekend to look this warehouse over and think this through. Then I will post a more informed question next week.

Thank you so much for your help!

 

[stevech]

You didn't respond to the conventional way to interconnect two buildings, as shown in the post above.

If you can't get wire run, then a bridge pair is the usual solution.

 

[Daybreak]

I want to acess the company wifi at my workstation in the warehouse where I work. I cannot get a signal from my workstation area. The place in the warehouse where I can get a good wifi connection on the company wifi is about 330 feet from where my computer is located at my workstation. My computer is a Acer MS vista small tower. The wifi card is a D-Link DWA-552 Xtreme N Desktop PCI Adapter. There are three antennas, four to five inches long, connected to the wifi card in the back of the computer. I can twist the antennas around in many directions. I screw in and out the antennas to connect/disconnect these antennas to the wifi card. That looks like the normal antenna connection on any wifi card.

My idea is I can unscrew one of the antennas from the wifi card. I can run a wire from my computer up along the warehouse rafters to the place where I can get good signal strength. I attach the wire to the wifi card in the back of the computer. I attach the one antenna to the end of the wire 330 ft away from my computer.

A wifi repeater or anything like that will not be allowed. If the company owner finds out that the company wifi is being rebroadcast in any way he would go ballistic. It may not make sense but this is the way it is.

Here are some questions about this idea:
1. What type of wire do I purchase to do this?
2. Where do I get your recommended wire?
3. How much will the wire cost?
4. How do I connect the wire to the wifi card and the antenna? Or maybe the correct question is how do I connect the hardware to the wire ends so I can screw in wire to wifi card and screw in antenna to end of wire?
5. Where do I get this connecting hardware?

By the way, I am 15 minute drive to Micro Center if I need things from there.
I do not need internet access at my warehouse work station to do my job so the company does not provide it. I just have a hand-me-down MS XP computer not connected to anything to do my work on. That is all I need to do my job every day. I brought in my old Vista small tower to my workstation and I will use that to connect to the internet. My goal is to listen to internet radio stations (Bloomberg radio) over the internet while I work. I have grown tired of the local broadcast radio stations.

Thank you for reading this post and thank you for any advice you can give.

Howdy,
Sit back and relax. You are working at a business. If they do not want you hooked to the internet... then they don't want you connected.

Internet radio? get serious. I know I have had to lock down locations due to internet availability abuses. One sight only had 3mb dsl service, and with 25 users, 4 listening to internet radio destroyed the bandwidth to the net as well as a remote vpn connected office.

You want internet radio, bring your cell phone and run your data. or ask the boss for internet access.

For your information, network cat 5 runs are good for approx. 100 meters (328ft)

 

[sfx2000]

For your information, network cat 5 runs are good for approx. 100 meters (328ft)

In the best of cases...

To the OP, you're not going to solve this problem... take it up with management and a good consultant if network access to the business systems is critical...

Otherwise, if MGMT isn't on-board - paper records and enjoy FM...

 

[stevech]

My employer, and many/most others, would discipline or likely fire an employee that connected a WiFi bridge or AP to the company's network. Not so in a SOHO.