General wifi question

[90c4]

There are a bunch of deals on wireless routers that are less than $10 or free after rebates, so I bought 2. I disabled DHCP on one of them and am using it as an access point on my wired network. It works great, but I have a huge house - 6500 sq feet - and reception is a little spotty from either end with the router in the middle. If I hook up the second one - which is a different brand - can a wifi pda automatically find it, or would I have to select the access point prior to use? I don't want to open it if it won't serve my purposes.

[Aaron]

they work separately... thus you will need to manually switch channels even if you have the same SSID and encryption setup.

UNLESS... the APs are so far apart that they do not overlap signals otherwise you will have a conflict.

You can try it... it may just work.

[rhinoman]

Both me and a mate have a wireless router and seperate access points, both are set to the same channel and ssid and the wireless pda and laptop work fine andautomatically roam from one to the other, you will need them wired into the network though, they dont work as a bridge to bounce the signals from one to the other.

I had trouble with a netgear router and belkin access point (both 54g) swapped the belkin for a netgear one and its been fine ver since, my mate has the same netgear router and a 11b belkin access point (yes I know it slows the g to b) and they work fine together.

I think its a bit of a lottery.....

[edgley]

I got a Linksys AP to attach to a Linksys router wirelessly and it worked to expand the Wifi cell very well.