How to Expand Your Wireless Range Using an Old Router

all right this is SSL family dad and today I'm going to show you how to use an old router to expand your wireless network or improve wireless range throughout your home or property [Music] okay so you've got wireless setup in your house but let's say you've got a large house maybe a ranch a longer home and you're just not getting real good wireless reception in certain areas or rooms of your home you know you're getting the buffering when you're trying to watch the SSF and the YouTube videos or something like that this is also very handy if you have an outbuilding a greenhouse a pole barn a garage anything like that maybe that's even attached from your home where you want to extend the wireless signal out too now there's a couple things that you'll need to do this number one you'll need an old router any old router will do I've got a couple old Netgear routers here this one's a couple of years old this is a wireless and standard router this is a real one probably almost ten years this is a real old netgear wireless G standard router any old router will work obviously you know a newer more powerful wireless n router is probably best but any old router will do the other thing that you're going to need to do this is you'll have to have an Ethernet cable run from your existing router out to the location where you want to extend your network so if that is an outbuilding like a pole barn or garage you have to somehow run an Ethernet cable maybe underground or on an overhead pole or something out to that area and then we'll set up the the new wireless out in that location in my case I have a router on every floor of our home gives us a good wireless coverage on each floor of our house so we have a basement and main floor in an upstairs and I've run Ethernet cords just from the basement to each level of the home so I can install one of these access points very easily and so today I'm going to show you the process that I use to convert from a router into what's called an access point so there's a few things that you settings that you need to disable and a certain certain configuration that you need to do on a router to turn it into an extra wireless access point in your home I'll take you in close and show you step by step what to do and I'll also show you on the computer how to configure the router to become an access point and operate the way you need to okay so the first thing we need to do with our router whether it's your router an old router that you had or whether you got it for a resale shop or garage sale or something like that the first thing you want to do is reset it and get back to its factory state so we're gonna clear all the settings that are in there and reload it back to it the way it was out of the box there's a real easy way to do that every router has no matter which brand it is it has some type of a reset button for instance here on this older Netgear router you'll see a small little pin hole in this little button here in this little vent and that's the reset button for this router not very clearly labeled but at least you can see that there this is the router that we're actually going to do the reset on today and as you can see this one's labeled a little more clearly reset factory settings and it's got a restore factory settings it's got the the pin hole with the red marking around it and so all you're gonna do is just take your paper clip or pen or pencil ID and you're just gonna hold it or stick it in that little hole there you can feel a button depress and you want to hold that firmly in place for approximately 10 seconds so you can count out 10 seconds and then once you've held it in there for that long go ahead and release the button a little shorter than 10 seconds but for demonstration purposes that should work and what you'll see happen is that the router actually will start to reset and I just saw the orange light come on here and it'll go through its little stealth self startup and it's in the process right now of resetting it back to factory settings and that's all that you need to do so once you get this reset to factory settings I'll show you the next step okay so one of the first things that we need to do here is get some preliminary information from the current network that you have setup in your home and so there's just a real couple real simple steps we're gonna take here and we're gonna take a few notes so get a pen and paper handy to write a few things down so the first thing that we're gonna do is just hold that Windows key down on your keyboard and the windows key is just that little windows flag normally the bottom left-hand corner of your keyboard in between ctrl and alt so you're gonna hold down the windows key and then tap the letter R that's going to bring up a run box or run prompt here and then the next thing we're gonna do is type in the letters C em D and then you can press Enter or click on OK and now what we have here is a command prompt then we're just going to type in one simple command to pull up some information about our current Network the the command we're going to type is AI P config IP Co n fi G press enter and what we've done here is pulled up our Internet Protocol or IP configuration on our current network and I may have some extra information that you won't have here just because I have some additional network equipment but what you're going to be looking for is this section right here and this is where it will list the ipv4 IP version 4 address which is the IP address of your computer the subnet mask which is has to do with that subnet mask or the subnet of your your current network that you're on it will normally always be 255 255 0 and the default gateway address which is what we're going to pay attention to here so the information that we're concerned with is these first three digits of this default gateway and so in my case it's 192.168.1 and so I'm gonna write that down 192.168.1 and I'm gonna pick my last number so this is the IP address of my router I want to pick a different IP address and I would recommend picking an IP address that's high so maybe like 150 or 220 or something like that you can't go any higher than 254 but you can pick any address up and up in the top end of that range so for our example we're gonna pick 220 so in my case I'm going to notate down 192.168.1.2 hundred and 20 again you can pick any number you want here just make it higher in the range so you might have something different here like 192.168.0.1 that's fine just notate the first three digits and then pick your last one 220 in this case you might have 1000 on or 10 dot zero dot one dot one again you're picking off or you're gonna write down the first three digits and then pick your last one and so that's going to be the IP address of your of our new access point that we're going to configure here so in my case again it's going to be 192.168.1.2 hundred and twenty that's going to be the IP address that we're going to use today it's all go ahead move on to the next step okay so once you've figured out what IP address you're gonna use for your router so what address they we're gonna assign to it a little bit once you have that figured out the next step is going to be to first disconnect your laptop from any current wireless network or any other network that it's connected to so make sure that's not connected to the internet and turn off wireless or whatever you need to do to disconnect it from your current network power on your new reset for a wireless router here we're just going to take any standard ethernet cable and go ahead and first plug it into one of the four ports on the back of your router so we're never going to use this yellow port anymore that was to connect this up to an internet modem and we're not using that anymore so we're only gonna use these four ports in fact you can put a piece of tape over that one if you want to so go ahead and plug in your Ethernet cable to the router and the router is powered on and then we're gonna plug the other end of our ethernet cable into our computer's Ethernet port and now go ahead and take you back into the computer here and I'll show you how to actually configure get access to the router and then configure the settings in this so that it will behave properly on your current network and act as he just a wireless extension so the first thing we'll have you do is just press the Windows key and the letter R same as we did before type in CMD again and press Enter and we're open a command prompt and we're gonna press IP config again and this is going to give us that same information so we're looking again mainly at this default gateway this IP address right here so you need to write that down in my case again it's 192.168.1.1 this this time we're going to write the whole thing down you might have 10 dot 0 dot 0 dot 1 or 192.168.0.1 or whatever it is right now in that default gateway address and then go ahead and close out the command prompt box the next thing we do is just open up whatever browser you prefer to use doesn't matter Google Chrome Internet Explorer or Firefox whatever you want to use Safari of course and we're not going to be able to get on the internet so you're going to get a page you know an error or whatever trying to display whatever website you're trying to go to I'm gonna go up to the top here in this address bar and erase everything that's up there and we're gonna type in that address that we just notated in my case it was 192.168.1.1 and press enter.now this is gonna give us access directly to our router okay now it's going to pop up with a with a password username and password box here to log into the router now since we reset it back to factory defaults it's going to be using the factory admin or a fat factory username and factory password for the for the router for Netgear routers it's always going to be admin for the username and password for the password for a Linksys brand router it's always going to be admin for the username and admin for the password for a Vulcan brand router generally it's admin for the username and blank there's no password for d-link I believe it's admin and admin normally this will be in your manual it will be written on the bottom of the router or if you have any questions about a certain model go ahead and throw those in the comments and I'll try to find that out for you so in my case again that gear routers are always admin and password I type that in and press ok ok so once we're logged in to our router here just depending on the brand router you have these settings and menus might be in a different place but what you're going to be looking for first is our wireless settings and again Linksys I think has some menus across the top area Netgear generally along the side here as well as Belkin and d-link but you're gonna click on wireless settings and this is just what we're going to name the we're going to give a name to our new wireless network that we're creating in the home and so I'm just going to for demonstration purposes here name this SSL family dad G and this is a dual band router I'm using and so it actually has two to two wireless networks that it broadcast so I'm gonna I won't get too into that but I'm gonna name both of those and we're just looking for the setting it says usually says name or SSID and you can type in your name for your network there and we also want to put security on here so no one else gets into it if you have the option select wpa2 if you do not then you can just stick with regular WPA if your router is very old and you only have WEP you might want to consider using a little bit newer router but you could select ww P for security also but that's the lowest lowest security and so then you'll it'll ask you to create a password of course you want to make that a strong password but we're just doing a quick example here alright so we've got our new wireless network names typed in here under the name or SSID we have our security type selected and we have a password or passphrase selected that's going to be needed any time you connect to this network so you want to keep keep note of that and at this time we'll go ahead down to the bottom and hit apply ok and once our settings have been applied we're gonna make one more adjustment to the router and this is the major one and on this case it's down under our Advanced Settings a lot of times it will be under advanced or what be called LAN or local area network setup or land management or network management or be under a topic or menu option similar to that but on the neck here here we're going to select the LAN setup and we're going to make two changes here so one of the most important is that you're going to turn off this option to use the router as a DHCP server dynamic host control protocol we do not want our router to be assigning IP addresses to anyone our main router is going to do all of that so we're going to disable this feature we're not going to use this anymore so it's basically not really working as a router anymore the next thing that we're going to do is under IP address this is the current IP address of our router and all we're gonna do is change this last digit as I talked about earlier the one that you wrote down that you picked you might have 10.0.0.0 to just change that last digit to whatever whatever IP address that you picked and take note of that anytime you want to manage this access point you'll need to know that IP address okay so now this is going to be the new IP address of this new wireless access point okay so the two changes IP address of the actual router itself we changed and we turned off DHCP those are important things to do and then hit apply it's going to give you a warning here in many cases that it will tell you basically after we change this and we turn off DHCP you will no longer be able to access this this router and it will no longer work as a router basically it's saying into in different ways here and so we can go ahead and click OK on that okay so we've got our router all configured and now it's actually not a router anymore it's called an access point so it's just acting as a wireless access point or another wireless network in your home so we've got that all configured it ready to put in in this case I've got to set it up on top of this Hut that's on top of our desk so it's in a real high location you want to hook up wireless you always want to have this off off the floor it is the best you can and give you the best where it was signal strength throughout your house so I already have an Ethernet cable run up through the floor and back up behind our desk here from our existing router that's in the basement and I'm gonna do is just plug this ethernet cable into one of the four ports on the back of the router I'm not going to use this LAN port or wide area network port this is only for the main router that's connected to our modem and hooked up to our internet service I'm not going to use that one I'm just going to use one of these four ports here so again Ethernet cable coming from the router downstairs gets plugged in one of these four ports and then we're gonna go ahead and plug in our power cable and then set that router in place or that access point in place and that's it so now you've got a another extension to your wireless network you can add as many of these as you want in your home just you just have to run an Ethernet cable to the location where you want to have it in a later video I'll actually talk about wireless repeating or basically just using one wireless router to wirelessly connect to another router and bounce the signal further that way they're also plate ways that you can do that with different products but this is the most simple way to add an extra wireless access point to your home and extend your wireless network so hopefully that helped you out if you have questions I do monitor the channel regularly please ask questions in the in the comment section below I'll try to do my best to answer those and help you out if you have trouble with the process or have any other questions if you have something to add I'd love to hear it please hit thumbs up if you appreciate the video or found it informational at all I always do really appreciate that we'd love to have you follow along with the channel so subscribe if you're interested in you know we do technology how to DIY stuff around the house we do all kinds of sustainability projects wood burning heaters and aquaponics and gardening and square foot gardening you know things like that you can also find us and follow us on Facebook Twitter Instagram and Pinterest we'd love to have you there and interact with you in any way can so as always thanks for watching have a good one [Music] you

Channel: SSLFamilyDad

Views: 3,746,999

Rating: 4.8487439 out of 5

Keywords: Wireless (Industry), how to, Router (Computer Peripheral Class), sslfamilydad, ssldad, simple suburban living, wireless extender, how to configure an access point, garage sale, router, linksys, netgear, dlink, belkin, ipv4, dhcp, ipv6, ports, switch, four port, wan port, how do I hook up a second router?, disabling dhcp, how to find your ip address, Wireless LAN (Industry), IP Address (API), garage, pole barn, green house, extend, expand, range, wireless interference

Id: n3plXzZ1Ckc

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 19 2015