I recently ran into trouble with my ISP and had to leech off a neighbors signal for a couple weeks until the ISP is working again. I live in a brick house with a brick wall around it. Making it nearly impossible for my signal to reach a neighbor. I had a few routers sitting around from old projects I worked on. None of the router had repeater functions built into the firmware, but I had read about alternative firmware a year or two ago.

Enter DD-WRT, people say dd-wrt make a $60 router into a $600 router. It open all the possibilities of the hardware in the router. Some router are easy to upgrade via the web based gui firmware upgrade. Others need a port installed on the routers board in the most extreme cases. One of the routers I had was able to upgrade to DD-WRT v24 via the web gui firmware upgrade. I set the router up with dd-wrt and installed it in a weatherproof box and mounted it outside of my house. Once I had setup the router as a repeater I could connect to the router via wifi and choose which AP I wanted to connect to.

If you are in a remote location or have a difficult wifi situation this might be the solution for you.

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