Get Wireless Coverage in your entire house Create Your Own Wireless WiFi "Hotspot"

I happen to have a rather large home and when I had only one wireless router working my laptop would not get good signal strength in the far parts of my house, or worse it would lose the signal.

I fixed this in a very simple fashion, I simply installed another wireless router in the rear of my house. I essentially made my own "hotspot". I have seen various articles and hubs on the net that make this sound like you need a MIT PHD to accomplish this. This is simply not true, in fact it's very easy.

I have been asked how to do this by so many people now that I have decided to write a Hubpage and point then to this. I will detail out the steps so that virtually anyone can create this "hotspot" and save $$$$ and frustration by having to surf the net for the various instructions.

You will need several items:

• A existing wireless router and access to the configuration of that router.
• A free "LAN Ethernet" port on the back of your existing router
• A Ethernet cable to connect the two wireless routers.
• A second wireless router and the ability to configure that router.
• A free "LAN Ethernet" port on the back of your new router

Step 1- Determining the information you need from your router.

You need to find out several things from your existing wireless router. We will need that information to sucessfully configure the new wireless router.

Log into your existing router and determine the ip address. This is usually something like 192.168.1.x or 192.168.0.x were "x" is a number from 1 to 255. For example here I will assume the address of the existing wireless router is 192.168.1.1

You will need to know the "ssid" and "channel" that your wireless router is using.

the "ssid" is usually somelike "smithfamilyrouter" or "linksys" . the wireless channel can vary but is usually from 1-12 lets assume it says 1. and the SSID is "myrouter"

Step 2 Configuring your new wireless router.

There are a lot of ways to do this. I typically plug a cord into my laptop and then a "Ethernet" port on the router. Turn the router on that then the router will assign you PC a address. You will have to look at the router instructions to see the assigned address of the router but it's usually 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1. Open a web browser and type the IP address ( the numbers above) into the place you usually type things like www.google.com. The router will usually ask for a login, again use the manual it came with to determine this.

OK lets assume we have this working. We need to set several things.

The "SSID" needs to match you existing wireless router, so make the new one in the example case say "myrouter"

The channel shoudl be set to something opposite if the channel of th existing router, so in our case since the example router was channel 1 we will set it to channel 12.

We need to change the "ip address" of the new router. This is crucial so be careful. The ip address needs to be unused and on the same "subnet" , this is a technical term so in our case I usually go with this. If the existign routers ip address is 192.168.1.1 I would assign our new router 192.168.1.254 if it were 192.168.0.1 I would assign it 192.168.0.254 see how I am matching the numbers except for the "0" and the "1".

Finally we need to turn off something called "DHCP" Only 1 router will need to be assigning dynamic ip addresses so we can turn it off on the new router.

***Warning*** since you have turned DHCP off and changed the router address you will not be able to connect back to it via the PC easily. If you still need to contact the router at this point you will have to change the PC IP address manually to the same subnet as the router. I.E. If you assigned the router 192.168.1.254. you would have to assign the PC something like 192.168.1.253 and then enter the address "192.168.1.254" in the browser window to access the router.

Save the configuration and note the items you have changed by writing them down.

Unplug the router from the pc and power it down.

Step 3 Wiring the router

Final step is to take a Ethernet cable from a "LAN" "Ethernet" on the existing router and plug it into the ethernet port on the new router. "Caution " do not plug ether end of the Ethernet cord into the "WAN" ports, this gets a lot of the folks I talk to.

We are just about ready to go, plug the router in and then power the router on.

You now have a working wifi router "hotspot" that gets you great coverage in your whole house.

If you want to configure the router simply from a pc enter 192.168.1.254 in the browser and the login page should come up.

This will also have the benefit of giving you "wired" Ethernet ports on your new wireless router that you could into should you need to.