Anybody has the WRE54G Wireless Range Expander?

[Sean Mota]

I bought one of this with the assumption that it was easy to set up and boy I was for a surprise.

I have a linksys router WRT54G and I wired the Expander to the router and the installation goes well but everytime I disconnect the wire from the router it will not light the two blue leds (that tells you that the wireless is working). When I tried to do it wireless (without wired to the router), the installation goes well and it connects wireless and it expands the range of my signal well but it does not connect to the internet. I am using WEP and seems like this is a bitch to setup. If anyone has one of these setup with WEP please let me know what you did to make it work.

 

[TheForce]

Sean- I had the same problem and I finally took it back. I also tried the repeater and dual xcvr's too which I had problems as well. I bought two larger antennas for the wireless XCVR and that did the trick. I now get solid signal anywhere in the house.

 

[Peter Parker]

I do not own one but I have known folks that so. They had to configure it maually with all encryption off and then reenable the encryption.

FWIW a second router can be configured to do the same thing and generally does a beter job.

 

[BobMurdoch]

I got it to work, but only by turning the encryption off. Every now and then it loses the connection.... You unplug it and plug it back in and it seems to find the router again..

 

[Bogy]

Something to keep in mind when using range extenders/expanders is that they will cut your signal speed in half.

I have two of the RE's. I was not able to get them to play nice with encryption. Fortunately, where I was using them it didn't matter. I was sending the signal between my house and my office at the church next door, and the only way anyone was going to pick up the signal was to sit between the two.

In the past year I had a weird experience, and I don't know exactly what caused it, but I suspect the range expander had something to do with it, but that is just a guess. I was using an access point to send the signal to a range expander, which transfered the signal to a usb adapter. I used this setup for about a year, needing to reboot everything every few months to reestablish the connections. Then it stopped working completely. After a lot of testing and head scratching it hit me that all three devices, access point, range expander and adapter, now had the same MAC number. 2 of the devices had acquired the same number as the third. If I remember correctly, the RE and the adapter now had the same number as the AP. Obviously, you can't have multiple devices with the same MAC # on the same network. While I still use another RE on my network for laptop use in an otherwise "dead spot", I changed the connection in this case to a wireless bridge using 2 AP's. I have my network at home bridged with my church's network, right next door. This actually works better because the networks are bridged, and I can access all computers from any location on either network.