Weak reception

SomethingElse

My mobile broadband reception is very poor inside my house, almost unusable. However less than 50m away the speeds are great. Does anyone have any genius ideas on how I could transmit the reception from that area into my house? Laying cables etc would be no problem as it's all on my property. I'd just love to have decent broadband for a change.

bealtine

SomethingElse wrote: »

My mobile broadband reception is very poor inside my house, almost unusable. However less than 50m away the speeds are great. Does anyone have any genius ideas on how I could transmit the reception from that area into my house? Laying cables etc would be no problem as it's all on my property. I'd just love to have decent broadband for a change.

first of all there's a forum for mobile "broadband" : http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=1147

You'll get better answers there.

second mobile internet is not really broadband so you'll never get "decent broadband" with it

Knasher

I'd start by making sure you can't get reception anywhere inside your house, if you have thick walls the signal might have a problem getting though, but it is possible that you could put a router near a window where it gets better reception and then rebroadcast the signal over wifi to where it needs to go.

If you really do need it to be 50m away, then sure you could set something up. My uncle was in a similar situation, he had very poor mobile reception and no other broadband option, so I set him up with an antenna connected to a low powered linux computer, powered off a length of cat5 carrying power and etherent, to an old router I had spare which broadcast a wifi signal. Hardest part by far was running the cable.

SomethingElse

Knasher wrote: »

I'd start by making sure you can't get reception anywhere inside your house, if you have thick walls the signal might have a problem getting though, but it is possible that you could put a router near a window where it gets better reception and then rebroadcast the signal over wifi to where it needs to go.

If you really do need it to be 50m away, then sure you could set something up. My uncle was in a similar situation, he had very poor mobile reception and no other broadband option, so I set him up with an antenna connected to a low powered linux computer, powered off a length of cat5 carrying power and etherent, to an old router I had spare which broadcast a wifi signal. Hardest part by far was running the cable.

Hey, thanks a million for the reply, I checked for a signal everywhere inside the house, and outside. I've since found a place only about 25m away that suits, I'm thinking maybe I could place the mobile broadband modem in that area and run usb cable back to the house. I'm not sure if that distance would have any negative impact though.

SomethingElse

What I'm currently getting

bealtine

SomethingElse wrote: »

What I'm currently getting

There are lots of posts on this topic (with pictures) and suggestions in the midband forum. They do this sort of thing regularly over there so you'll get plenty of answers there

SomethingElse

This is the broadband speed I'm hoping to tap into

Knasher

Putting it at the end of a long USB cable isn't going to work. At that range the signals will take so long that the USB spec says to assume they are dropped. On top of that you would also have some voltage drop, so the device probably wouldn't even power on. The USB spec says the max length is 5 meters.

Have a look at the midband forum anyway, and see if you can find a post that helps.

Otherwise if you want to go down the route my uncle took, then I'm happy to tell you what you will need to buy and how to go about setting it up. First thing though would be to make sure your 3g dongle is compatiable with linux. What make and model is it?

SomethingElse

What I'm using at the moment is a Huawei E586, and I also have older modems like the K3520 lying around somewhere. I've used them on Ubuntu before so they probably would be ok?

The Huawei E586 is one of those wifi hotspot modems. From the point where I want to place it, it's range extends to just about my front door, I think the thick walls begin to hamper it at this stage. I'm just looking up wifi range extenders/repeaters at the moment. I had this idea that I might be able to use JoikuShare on an old smartphone I have to act as a repeater but it didn't seem to work, I'm guessing you can't both receive and transmit wifi at the same times from the mobile.

Thanks for your help Knasher, much appreciated

Knasher

Hey, sorry for not getting back to you, was pretty busy for the last couple of days.

Anyway, you could put the hotspot in a ip67 rated plastic box outside where you have a good signal, then have a wireless repeater inside. The biggest downside would be that you would have to keep bringing it in and out to charge the thing, and to be honest I'd say that is more trouble than it's worth. If you were to run power cables to it, I'd say it would be more reliable to just run ethernet cable altogether.

The approach I'd be taking is to get the waterproof box, a raspberry pi and an sd card, some outdoor ethernet cable, a cheap wireless router, a 24 volt powersupply for the pi. The pi needs 5 volts, but if you were to use a 5 volt power supply then the voltage at the end of the cable would be too low, so you need a higher powersupply and a dc/dc convertor to change it back into 5 volt before it connects to the pi. Something like this should do the job (You may be able to find them cheaper elsewhere). The pi only uses 100mbit ethernet and 100mbit ethernet only uses 2 of the 4 twisted pairs in an ethernet cable, so you can use the other two pairs to send power , you can use passive poe injectors or you can just splice in the power into the cables yourself. You will also need a multimeter so you can measure the voltage at the voltage regulator and adjust it until it is at 5 volts.

The it is just a matter of getting the pi to dial the modem (I'd use the stick rather than the hotspot, less power consumption), and then handle the routing automatically. There are guides online to show how to do that. Then you would have the router inside in your house broadcasting the wifi.

andublin

Beware of lightning with that setup, could fry all equipment outside and inside . . .

Knasher

^^ Good point, probably worth putting a lightning arrestor on the ethernet cable as it comes into the house. I think you can get ones that work with power over ethernet.