Wireless repeaters are used to repeat your existing wireless network to reach longer distances and eliminate dead zones. As the best practice, you need to arrange the wireless repeater as far as possible from the wireless sources you need to rebroadcast, but still receive the signal, and close to the wireless clients which need to be covered within the wireless network.

Traditional repeaters are typically connected to 2dBi antennas which are designed to be Omni-directional in receiving the signal and rebroadcasting in all direction around the device. On the other hand, a directional wireless antenna is designed to focus the wireless signal only to one direction, thus it can cover longer distance. To meet your requirement, a wireless repeater should be engineered to receive to signal using directional antenna, so it can focus the signal to a certain direction with longer distance and rebroadcast the signal using Omni-directional to cover wireless clients within all direction. Is there any wireless repeater that meets the above requirements? Consider the HOW2R1 Hi-Gain Outdoor smart repeater

What this Product Does

HOW2R1 Hawking is a Hi-Gain Outdoor 2.4GHz Wireless-300N dual radio smart repeater which connects and repeats your existing wireless network with up to 64x the power output and 8x the distance of a standard Wireless-G device. HOW2R1 Outdoor Smart Repeater is designed with two different radio frequency bands, one radio band is dedicated for receiving the signal source and the other radio band is dedicated for rebroadcasting the signal source in an Omni-direction using two external 5dBi Omni-directional antennas. Unlike traditional wireless repeaters where signal receiver uses Omni-directional antenna, the HOW2R1 captures the receiving signal (signal source) using 11dBi directional antennas integrated internally.

With this dual-radio with different dedicated function, the repeater effectively eliminates wireless dead spots inside and outside of your large home or office.

Advanced Security

HOW2R1 Outdoor Smart Repeater is powered by the fastest wireless 802.11n standards. 802.11N is the latest wireless standard which was approved by the IEEE last Sep 2009 as the final version of the previous draft 802.11n. No significant changes actually but some additional options. The device is designed for outdoor environment and is packed with many advanced security features including IEEE 802.11x authentication, MAC address filter to control the access right, the latest industrial wireless security Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA/WPA2) and WEP (for legacy client connections), and hidden SSID.

The good thing with this wireless repeater is that it features broadband router including:

1. Firewall. Traditional repeaters do not support firewall feature. With firewall, all traffic will be filtered based on security policy set

2. NAT (network address translation), can be used to hide the internal network and combined with the DoS protection helps protect your network against any network threats.

3. Access control: allows you control who have access right or deny access based on the MAC address or IP address filter.

4. DMZ (demilitarized zones) feature helps you create a security boundary to provide public resource separated from your private network

5. Port forwarding allows you expose certain ports to the public

6. URL blocking allows you control which URLs are denied

Smart Repeater Support Utility

In order to configure, and troubleshoot the wireless connection for multiple smart repeaters, the HOW2R1 includes Windows based Smart Repeater Support Utility. With this support utility, you can upgrade the firmware, reset devices to factory settings, adjust IP settings, scan and connect to wireless Internet networks and view current system settings. The Utility uses a proprietary communication protocol to connect to the Smart Repeater without having to know the correct IP settings. With data transfer rate of up to 300Mbps, the HOW2R1 is an ideal solution for high performance wireless network environment, extending the wireless signals within the large houses or businesses, or providing wireless access to the yards and other harsh environments.

By Ki Grinsing