Is there a way to extend the capturing strength of your router, like get closer to a wifi network not physically but virtually?

Antenna gain.  That is, replace your router's antenna with one having more gain.

(Last edited by mk24 on 25 May 2017, 00:41)

I have a my net n750 so no antennas, but i assume id have to mess around with the setting in winscp just don't know where to start. Have any idea where?

Maybe open it up and solder some new ones onto there somehow?

(Last edited by noviceuserhere on 25 May 2017, 00:44)

Looks like the 5 GHz antennas have U.FL connectors but the 2.4 are soldered in (there are those odd factory test connectors, no sure if you can buy pigtails that plug into them).

https://wikidevi.com/wiki/File:WD_N750_board_top.JPG

Another option is to plug in a USB wifi dongle with a good antenna, and set it up as a third radio.

You have to do something in hardware.  There is nothing that software can do when the signal reaching the radio chip is too weak.

(Last edited by mk24 on 25 May 2017, 00:57)

Alright will give that a try. Thanks for the pics, and help.

...wait how would i set it up as a 3rd radio?

(Last edited by noviceuserhere on 25 May 2017, 01:16)

First, ensure your OpenWRT installation has the USB essential components installed: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/usb.essentials

Installing the above components ensures that the kernel can use the USB bus devices that are built-in to your router. The bus device is then responsible for enumerating and identifying slave devices on the USB bus, and will create descriptors for all devices and all features supported by a single slave device: http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documen … ration.pdf

Next, ensure you have the correct drivers and possibly a firmware blob available for your device. This process is device-specific. It is possible that OpenWRT already has a driver for your device (see https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/wireless.overview for some help). It seems that this page has not been maintained in quite a while though, so it might be out of date. There is a link to the Wireless-testing GIT repository, which contains source code for the current wireless drivers available for Linux.

You will then need to identify the chip that is inside your dongle. The manufacturer can help you with this, just send them an e-mail. You can also try to identify it yourself using tools such as 'lsusb', which can tell you the Product and Vendor IDs of the chip. For this purpose, I recommend plugging the device to a desktop Linux distribution, since they usually have a higher degree of support for different USB dongles out of the box. Beware that depending on the hardware of the dongle, the results of these tests may be useful, or might not be. If e.g. the dongle has a dedicated USB interface chip and a dedicated wireless chip, then any PID and VID details you'd see are the ones of the interface chip.

Depending on the chip, there are four possible outcomes:

• Easy: The device is supported already by an OpenWRT package - you just need to find the correct package and install it

• Medium: Someone else has already patched a suitable source code distribution for usage in OpenWRT - you just need a OpenWRT build environment to cross-compile these sources to an installable package

• Difficult: The wireless-testing repo has suitable source code for your device - you will need to patch & cross-compile these sources using an OpenWRT build environment to get a proper, installable package

• Insane: The manufacturer provides a Linux driver source code package - you will need to patch & cross-compile these sources extensively using an OpenWRT build environment, and debug, test and verify that the driver works

For the sake of simplicity, pray that you get away with the easy option...

After the proper driver and possibly a firmware blob is made available, you can plug in the device and monitor 'dmesg' output to see if your new radio device was created correctly. If it was, you now have a new 'radioX' device available, and you proceed to configure the new wireless network just as if you would configure any other wireless network on OpenWRT (https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/uci/wireless)

I know this isn't exactly a step-by-step guide, but I hope it at least gives some pointers.