Apartment Complex Wi-Fi

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Riyonuk
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Apartment Complex Wi-Fi

Post by Riyonuk » Wed Sep 02, 2009 10:22 pm

I haven't been active here in ages. I'll be moving to an Apartment Complex on the 12th. While checking out the vicinity, I was preparing myself for being a broke College student. What better way to save money, than leeching off their free Wi-Fi Access? I brought my PSP, since I sold my laptop, and did a little wardriving (walking in this case). A good 10+ AP's were in range, some stronger than others. Most were protected in one form or another. Now my question is this. Can I salvage the router I'm currently using, my Netgear WGR614v7 and use it in conjunction with a high-end antenna? What recommendations can I get on type of antenna (Yagi, Panel, Omni, etc)?

I was going to purchase a Cantenna, but after further research, found out it wasn't all bad as I thought it out to be. I then stumbled across a 15 dBi Omni directional antenna that is only ~$100. My current Internet cost is about $50/Month, so I figure $100 is a steal, as I plan to use my Internet for 4+ years. What about the hype of N routers?

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Thor
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Re: Apartment Complex Wi-Fi

Post by Thor » Thu Sep 03, 2009 1:24 pm

Yeah you can use a big antenna like that with it, but you will need to pop it open and modify the connection by soldering it to the board. I did this awhile ago with an old linksys router and a homemade cantenna, add some aircrack-ng to the mix and you got yourself a good handful of personal proxies you can control.

I don't have a particular type of commercial antenna I recommend, the ones you mentioned work well.(Omni is a good brand)

In the near future I will upgrade to a real big antenna that attaches to a wireless card in my desktop. I trying to go for real big range (1 mile atleast).

The router modifications I did in the past worked very well, but the problem I had was that the router can only power the antenna so much. So the antenna wasn't powered enough to get the range I really wanted, but you will get just about all the base...nets in your apt. complex.

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SLaX
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Re: Apartment Complex Wi-Fi

Post by SLaX » Fri Sep 18, 2009 12:07 pm

you were going to PURCHASE a cantenna? :lol:

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Cool_Fire
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Re: Apartment Complex Wi-Fi

Post by Cool_Fire » Thu Oct 15, 2009 10:11 pm

Riyonuk wrote: Can I salvage the router I'm currently using, my Netgear WGR614v7 and use it in conjunction with a high-end antenna?
You can pick up an antenna that will give you a 7-12 bBi boost for maybe 50 bucks if you're lucky, and they'll screw right onto the router.

I don't know if you can set this specific router up to be an ethernet client (Which means it connects to an accesspoint and acts as a transparant gateway.) I know you can make it do that with dd-wrt, but it seems your router isn't supported :(

Anyway, you might want to concider going to some neighbours and just asking them. That'd save you a lot of time cracking WPA/WEP keys. There are other people like me out there. Who knows, you might just get lucky. (I have a public and a private accesspoint set up right now.)

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