Getting Wifi to Studio from House

There are, as always, "many ways to skin the cat." Not that I have attempted discovering truth or otherwise of the proverb.

So makes sense to stay with the prior plan?

I vaguely remember the previous discussion. Reading through your post my opinion has not altered.

Although I am not so wrapped in your idea of the AC3000 external satellite on the barn at the 3/4 point. My concern would be using the wireless inside the studio is based solely on your construction used in the building. Many modern buildings are wrapped in foil coated insulation. An excellent way to totally block radio waves. (Hence the foil hat on your head recommendations).

TEST TEST TEST .. before you outlay any money setup a cheap wireless router in the barn location. Use a wireless analyser and see how much signal you get in the studio.

Big EDIT.. I started the post before your second post.. good to see you are thinking in the right direction. I will leave the original content.

Little Edit. Bars on a phone is NOT really good enough. You really want actual dB signal loss.. as that stays constant no matter what bars are doing.

The test is simple to do. It won't matter if the wireless router has no internet connection.. if you don't have anything suitable buy a $10 used router. Do use AC wireless to find the loss at 5ghz.

Just load the analyser onto a laptop or phone.. I have taken to using netspot free version lately.

Measure the signal at the barn say within 3M of the router. That gives you a baseline. (you are measuring differences not absolute values).

Measure it outside the studio.. subtract from baseline.. That gives you loss at the range.

Measure it inside the studio.. at the position you would be using the system. Again subtract value from baseline. If the loss goes up dramatically your studio insulation or building material is causing heavy signal attenuation. You should be using some other method.

Certainly for a high speed connection the original AC3000 is great buy. I have heard terrible stories of the AX versions. AX is still in Gen1 products. My advice is wait for Gen2.

One other point.. I would expect the Netgear to last 3 years.. minus lighting stikes etc. Plan for the investment to be recurring.

If this was commercial setup.. I would not recommend consumer products. I think a pro would recommend fibre optic cable. Or Ubiquiti Airmax units. etc.

I am not sure how important internet will be to the operation of studio and teaching classes as a money making exercise.

As soon as you turn commercial, you don't buy consumer stuff to make videos. Same with networking (or anything).

Since I didn't participate in your other post, I would suggest that you go with the Ubiquiti UniFi / airMAX lines to meet your requirements.

If you stay within their UniFi products, a UniFi Building-to-Building Bridge, would handle getting network/Internet access to your studio. FWIW, I use these for my work shop that is about 500' from my house.

FWIW. My experience is with the UniFi Building-to-Building Bridge devices. These are part of the Ubiquiti UniFi "family" and are managed via the UniFi Controller software.

Regardless, the only basic difference between these and your AirMax NanoBeam devices is how they are managed. How they are setup are fairly similar.

In my case, my "base" bridge is directly connected to one of my UniFi Switch 8 POE 60W switches which also provides it with direct POE power. That switch connects back to my "main" USG 3P router for Internet access. The bridge itself is located on my house.

My remote bridge is attached to my barn/shop. It also gets POE power from another UniFi switch also located in the barn. Attached to this switch I have connected an UniFi AP-AC-PRO wireless access point to provide wireless coverage in that building.

In my case,, both bridges get "adopted" by the controller software which makes them available to be managed as I see fit. The only slight difficulty I came across when lining up both bridges to get the best possible signal between them. Otherwise, they were pretty much "plug & play."

Your AirMax NanoBeams are excellent devices. They were designed to be used standalone from other Ubiquiti hardware and certainly makes sense in your overall non-Ubiquiti based network. Like my bridges, both the base and remote devices will require power and be properly aligned. However, the only difference would be how you manage them. In this case Ubiquiti provides a phone app or you can use a web browser for this. The key is Ubiquiti does state that you should employ a professional to properly setup the devices so that you do not violate any local regulations for broadcasting ... regardless of your rural location. Unfortunately, I do not have any personal experience with these AirMax devices to offer much help. Sorry!

As per your info about the Studio you built yourself and hence know exceedingly well how it was made the total loss from old AE to inside studio is

5ghz 15dB

2.4ghz 9dB

Additional loss over the distance from barn to outside studio to inside is negligible. So it is basically just the distance.. 50'

However you can see the loss from the house is dramatic ..

At 140' you have signal too low to be usable.

That means any setup will require the link device .. whatever you use to be placed either right inside the window (hopefully not tinted glass) or external unit like the Ubiquiti.

I may place the AC3000 satellite in the porch corner and retest the signals up near the barn.

This is not so easy to test.

Netgear use a separate wireless backhaul of high signal level and bandwidth. But this is not accessible to clients.. only the Orbi units connect to this.

You must test the mesh pair.

IMHO the best test is router unit inside the house plugged by ethernet to your main router. It should be placed right in the window to give excellent coverage inside and out. And place the satellite in the studio and just see how it goes. Signal level in the studio is now pretty much irrelevant. What you need to do is test the link actual speed. If your internet is fast enough a simple test with OOKLA is good enough but also interesting to do internal LAN speed test.

You can download some simple software to load on computer in the house and laptop in the studio and run the test.

I am still optimistic that setup in correct locations it can work well.. without anything else.

Tesserax has more experience on the Ubiquiti so i will leave him to comment. I have merely dabbled.

The product you are looking at nanobeam is fairly new so I have not seen them. They are reasonable price. Looking at the specs it is what I would buy to do the job if the AC3000 is insufficient. You need to wire them in suitable locations and run another wireless AP inside the Studio. Your old N wireless extreme would be ok as a start. The Ubiquiti pair is designed to replace a piece of wire and so is intended to be pretty much transparent.

I have fiber optic cable (maybe fiber optic DSL?, not sure). Whatever it is, it is fiber optic and pretty much as fast as it gets for homes.

What is the rated speed?

If it is fast enough then you don't need to bother with all the testing on LAN stuff .. simply getting standard internet speedtest will work well.

Ok.. if you have DSL no matter how fast is not such a good test of the performance of the link ..

Download the tamosoft tools WLAN throughput .. from here.

https://www.tamos.com/download/main/

It is free and available for PC, Mac, Android and iOS.

The download includes a server and client for PC and Mac. So you setup server inside the house on a computer and client on laptop or phone in the studio and then run the test.

Results look like this.

You don't need to worry about the detail .. I modified a set of EOP adapters to work over any wires. But the actual tests use ttclient and ttserver. (both included in the download).

https://sites.google.com/site/lapastenague/modify-powerline

See if this one works for you: https://unifi-network.ui.com

Correct placement of the satellite is important.

If you put the satellite in a weak signal area it will gain nothing.

Also you need to use the Orbi pretty much exclusively. They use a lot of wireless bandwidth. So you need to use Orbi as your wireless with Airport wireless turned off.

Place the satellite in an area where it has the least number of walls/floor thickness to reach the router downstairs.

As I'm sure that you found out, there are a number of modes that you can set these devices to. They are all managed via the airOS (vs. the UniFi Controller for my UniFi stuff) software.

You may find this YouTube video helpful. Crosstalk Solutions has posted a number of these that I've found making the transition to using Ubiquiti gear a little less "painful." Once you get the hang of it, you will be glad that you did.

• Simple PTP Wireless Bridge - Crosstalk Solutions

I wonder if that would work for the test?

Yes well enough for our purposes.

it is dual band. Is it AC wireless?

Yes dual band not AC but that is no big deal.. It still has N wireless on 5ghz. You are basically testing for signal loss. And it will show you what that is like.

I'll report back, if that is okay.

Sure