One Little Mistake Cost Me a Lot of Time Setting Up Wi-Fi Extenders

Monday July 25, 2022 Guerneville CA.one little mistake

One little mistake

Yes, it cost me a couple days of extra work getting the Wi-Fi extenders to work for me and my neighbors.

The mistake I made was in setting up one extender, I was working on the 4G channel and the name and password of the thing failed to work so I thought I had the wrong name and password. then it asked for the security key instead of the name and password which confused things some more. If they’d asked for the name and password I likely wouldn’t have gotten so mixed up. That confused things which made me think I had the wrong stuff to set things up.

The problem

The problem was the 4G channel was defective. That’s what might happen when you use some older equipment that was just sitting around.

I’m also not used to setting up Comcast cable equipment so that also induced some more confusion.

Today, I was determined to try some of the stuff I’d learned doing research on setting up Comcast stuff.

So, first thing I packed my laptop and extenders over to my brother’s place and tried again to no avail. They have a button on the router and the extender that one is supposed to just push and it all gets set up.,,,,,,,,,,,But. I tried that on both extenders and it didn’t work. So much for automatic.

Success

I was about to give up and do some more research and gave it one more try. I was setting up the  5G channel, when it asked for the security key, I decided maybe it wanted the password to hook to the network and typed it in and it worked. Finally. I tried to hook up the 4G Channel and that’s when I discovered that channel wouldn’t work.

Improving the neighborhood coverage

I was using my cell phone to check the signal of the Wi-Fi around the neighborhood the other day, but today, the darn phone wouldn’t start.

Looks like I need to buy another cell phone.

I thought maybe I could use the laptop to do the same thing if I could find a program to work so I looked around and found a couple of them. One worked real good and would show all the available Wi-Fi networks in the area and how strong they were.

That meant I walked all around the neighborhood several times to check the signal. I found that I could improve things a bit by moving the extenders around a bit to avoid trees and stuff that got in the way.

After some moving stuff around a bit I was able to get a good signal into my house and also over at my other neighbors, so all is good for now.

I think I can improve things a bit more with some more work, but for now, I’ve had enough. :O)

With all that running around I got a lot of good exercise today.

Nice day.