During our recent visit to Prince Edward Island (PEI, a province of Canada), I got to play with wireless repeaters. Good fun for an hour or so setting it all up. Details below.

We stayed here on PEI a week ago (Lyons' Cottages). In one of the cabins ringing that open oval shaped field of cottages. The property is long and narrow, about two football pitches or so, and too large to be covered by a single wireless AP.

The owners had wired internet in the office at the property entrance, but no wireless for the guests.

I asked if they wanted wifi, and they emphatically said YES, PLEASE!

So, we sent the owner's son into Charlottetown, to pick up three WRT54GL routers from a local vendor. Once we had the boxes, I upgraded them all to Tomato 1.28 and set about showing him how to configure them.

We installed one in the office, wired directly into their DSL router. It got set up as a DHCP client on the WAN side. For the LAN end, we used AP+WDS for wireless, WPA-PSK/AES, and we entered the MAC address of the second WRT54GL into the WDS parameters.

The second WRT54GL was then set up with no WAN, and as AP+WDS for the LAN side, with identical SSID/WPA/AES parameters. Ditto for the third WRT54GL.

On the second unit, we entered the wireless MACs for the first and third units into the WDS parameters, and entered the MAC of the second unit into the WDS config on the third unit.

The second unit was then plugged into power in a cottage up the hill from the Office, at the left end of the field, and the third was installed in a pump house mid-field. No cat5 wiring required.

EDIT: All of the units were also set to use exactly the same RF channel (11). The first (office) unit has the DHCP server function enabled, and the second, third (,fourth) units have it disabled -- their clients get DHCP from the first unit.

Within an hour of powering them all up, five of the twelve cottages were online and googling various things. Everyone else was probably still out on the beach.

Nice and simple.. no wires, easy config.

The kid actually purchased a fourth WRT54GL, so he'd have a spare. Just for fun, I got him to set up the fourth unit at the far right end of the field, linked to the third one. No hitches, no glitches, and still full 2mbit/sec internet access (the speed of their DSL connection). That's using four wireless hops!

Cheers