I'm about to do my second return at Staples because neither of the wireless boxes I bought so far will do this very simple thing:



I'm looking for the thing labeled "Mythical Black Box" in that diagram. I thought any old configurable wireless router would do. SIGH.

Both of the boxes I bought so far would have worked as the main access point, allowing other clients to connect to them. But I couldn't get them to act as a client or bridge to that access point. And I need that existing wireless router to remain my central hub because it's also my DSL modem.

One of the devices I bought, a Belkin F5D7230, looked very promising. And from the looks of all the setup screens, it should have worked. But it just wouldn't connect to the main AP, even when I activated bridging mode and gave it the setting where it was a pure wireless access point and not a router/firewall. (I forget their term for that last configuration tweak.)

The second thing I got was a netgear WGR 101. This was a mistake because I totally misread its purpose. See, I thought its purpose was to be plugged in like this:
Laptop->Wire->Netgear - > wireless - > hotel wireless lan
When in fact it was backwards of that:
Laptop - > wireless - > Netgear->Wire->hotel wired lan
So I couldn't get that one to work, either.

The Belkin tech support people told me the F5D7330 is what I want. In fact, they specifically told me that the 7230 I'd bought would NOT do what I want. The instructions only showed my 7230 supporting bridging if it was the main central hub, but not if it was one of the clients. Anyway, the guy I spoke to was in India and I'm not entirely trusting him. Not because he's from india, but just because the language barrier made it hard to describe what I wanted to do. And anyway, I don't think they have that one at Staples (Since I've been buying these things at Staples to make returns easy).

Anyone know of an inexpensive 54G router that'll do what I want in that illustration?