I have a workshop building located 320' ft from my home, home network router located about 460' total from the shop pc. When I ran power to the building I buried two flooded cat5e and 2 coax cables for PC, TV, alarm, telephone and internet. I figured I'd give straight ethernet a shot, even though the distance was too great. Of course it didn't work for ethernet, the tv was fine, and the phone worked for a while...Searching for a better solution, I bought a pair of "ethernet/telephone extender" boxes that have a telephone and ethernet jack on each, and that worked OK for a while, but with very slow connection speed, and sometimes when we had an electrical storm it would kill my ethernet card. I finally resorted to those $5 ebay ethernet to usb adapters and just changed them if they got toasted. About 2 years ago I decided to go wireless, and bought a pair of engenius eoc-2610 units, one configured as an access point, connected to my wndr-3700 router and the other as a client bridge at the remote building. The units are pointed at each other with no obstructions, 320' apart & powered with a power over ethernet injector. Signal strength is about -51dbm, noise -108dbm. I'm still getting 25-50% packet loss when I ping the client bridge from another pc connected to the router, and can barely if ever stream radio on the connection; in fact, the connection recently got so bad that I decided I better try and improve things...
In trying to troubleshoot this setup further, I brought the AP unit inside the house and put a 6' cable from the router to the POE, then another 6' to the AP unit. Even inside the house, I was now able to get perfect pings, even with signal strength in the -71 to -56dbm range, depending on if I had it on a tripod aimed directly or not (still line of sight of the CB, but no, my wife won't let me leave the tripod set up in the living room). Something fishy here, I made up a new cable (about 50') and moved the POE to within a few feet of the AP unit, and put it back up outside. Now I'm STILL losing 25-50% of packets again, WTF.. It almost seems to me that the router is unable to send a strong enough signal down the 50' wire to the AP, or that the AP can't "hear" the signal on that wire very well. Shouldn't the router & AP be able to hear each other over up to the max 328' spec for ethernet ? This equipment should be able to do the job, security is wpa2-psk, transmit power 25dbm (I bumped that up from 20) but it looks to me like the problem is in the wire-what am I doing wrong?
In trying to troubleshoot this setup further, I brought the AP unit inside the house and put a 6' cable from the router to the POE, then another 6' to the AP unit. Even inside the house, I was now able to get perfect pings, even with signal strength in the -71 to -56dbm range, depending on if I had it on a tripod aimed directly or not (still line of sight of the CB, but no, my wife won't let me leave the tripod set up in the living room). Something fishy here, I made up a new cable (about 50') and moved the POE to within a few feet of the AP unit, and put it back up outside. Now I'm STILL losing 25-50% of packets again, WTF.. It almost seems to me that the router is unable to send a strong enough signal down the 50' wire to the AP, or that the AP can't "hear" the signal on that wire very well. Shouldn't the router & AP be able to hear each other over up to the max 328' spec for ethernet ? This equipment should be able to do the job, security is wpa2-psk, transmit power 25dbm (I bumped that up from 20) but it looks to me like the problem is in the wire-what am I doing wrong?
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