Extend your wireless network… on the cheap

The camp I work at just sub­scribed to broad­band inter­net (bring­ing us out of the dial-up ages) and we decided it’d be a nice ges­ture to hook up our site manager’s house with inter­net too.

Prob­lem: the camp manager’s office in his house and our new inter­net access point are ~100 metres, 5 walls, and a few groves of trees apart.

Solu­tion: cre­ate mesh net­work using 2 Linksys WRT-300n routers ($100 each) and Sveasoft’s “Tal­is­man” firmware ($25/year sub­scrip­tion)

It took a lit­tle wan­gling (had to return one of the routers because it didn’t work prop­erly), but I got it work­ing. Plus, if I ever want to boost the sig­nal… say… to my cabin, all I have to do is buy another router, install the firmware, place it between the access point and my cabin and I’ll have inter­net access.

I love it when things just work! If any­one out there needs help mak­ing their own extended net­work using Tal­is­man, I am happy to help. Let me know in the comments!