Middlesex County, Ontario | A buried cable outperforms everything in every way. The limit of cat6e is 300' per run. If you could run 150' from house to barn, and then 200' from barn to arena, that would work fine.
- In the house you would just plug the cable into your router.
- In the barn you would plug both cables into a switch and access point. What consumers call a router is actually a router, switch, and access point all in one. If you have an old router lying around you would be able to install other firmware onto it and configure it for this job. You could also purchase a switch/access point combo, or a separate switch and access point.
- In the arena you would need an access point. Again, an old router with wifi can be configured for this job. You can also buy a travel router for ~$30 and configure it for this job. I have a $30 travel router setup this way in a barn office. Its range is limited to just the office, but then again all the office walls are steel so your mileage might vary. You could also just buy an access point from BestBuy or something.
If you can't bury cable then radio works well, but you need a clear line of sight. I used two Ubiquiti Nanostations to shoot 350' across the yard from the house to the barn. This connection has been rock steady and has needed zero maintenance or troubleshooting since I installed it 3 or 4 years ago. The barn radio runs to the barn office over another 150' of cable, which plugs into a switch. The switch connects to the travel router so that everyone phones have wifi, and the switch has additional Ethernet ports (to which a couple of IP cameras are connected, I could also connect a printer, desktop, etc). This install was tedious. I bought satellite dish mounting brackets for the radios and put them up on the side of the house and barn. I used power over Ethernet adapters to power the Nanostations, which I highly recommend so that you only have to run one cable to each radio. I purchased a bulk spool of cable and bought connectors, crimping tools, and cable checking tools. You have to run cable out of the house/barn and alongside the house/barn and make it look tidy and protect it from weather. If I had known how much work it was I would have looked a lot harder at burying cable.
I was able to configure both Nanostations as access points as well, so while the radios act as basically a wireless Ethernet cable, they also allow you to connect to wifi. This works so-so. The problem is that the Nanostations are like a megaphone and your phone is like a whisper and they need to talk to each other. Your phone always shows there is wifi available but you can't actually use it unless the Nanostation can hear your whispering phone. I was able to connect a wireless IP camera in another barn to one of these connections, but the signal drops out if there is weather. I've thought about setting up another wireless IP camera for loading into a nearby bin. Using the radios and having them both configured as access points do give you some options that cable doesn't. In my mind the best would still be cables ran to each building. |
Extending WiFi to barn?
