Usb antenna wifi in + internal wifi antenna out GL-AR300M

CuriousJor · 2018-03-30T21:19:42.359Z

Hey gl.inet community. I am new to the forum and want to start off by saying how happy I am with the GL-AR300M. I have a question that may or may not have been covered already - I apologize if it has been, and I have looked for someone with my particular question for a few days, with no luck. I was wondering if I could use the usb port of the AR300M (the model with the internal wifi antenna) to run a wifi antenna to receive wifi from a friend who lives a couple houses down and then the internal wifi antenna of the AR300M to transmit wifi to my devices in my house. Thanks for the help!

blue-wavenet · 2018-03-31T14:59:56.154Z

With a usb wifi dongle then yes. Problem is that most wifi dongles these days have moved to closed source and therefore not supported in LEDE/OpenWrt, although some reverse engineering is going on within the LEDE/OpenWrt community.
If you can get one, a Netgear N150 works well but these have been discontinued for a long time.
I would imagine you could cheat and use a GL-USB150.
On a different tack, I have used an AR300M-EXT on top of a pole, connected by ethernet to an AR300M-lite and used a POE injector and splitter to power the EXT at the top of the pole. It was a quick fix for a client after their Internet feed failed but worked perfectly for over a week with the EXT in a plastic bag in the rain and snow

CuriousJor · 2018-03-31T17:49:50.772Z

Thank you for the quick response. A summary of my situation. I just moved down the street from a friends house. We recently cut the cord with PS Vue. He was paying for internet & I was paying PS Vue Now that I moved out I was hoping to use his internet and allow him to still use my PS Vue. I am going back to school and would like to keep expenses as low as possible. I can get a decent signal from his house about 100 feet from my house so I was hoping to get / make a Wifi receiver to get his wifi signal all the way to my house.

If I bought a GL-AR150-Ext-2 and plugged up one of those long range wifi antennas in the AR-150-Ext-2 wifi antenna slot and then used a Ethernet from the AR150 LAN port to the AR-300M WAN port would that suffice? Basically, have the AR150 “act” as the modem receiving internet access and routing it to the AR-300M which would then distribute the WIFI signal to my devices (TV, xbox, laptop). Again, thanks for your time and advice

blue-wavenet · 2018-03-31T19:34:56.865Z

That would work but bare in mind that the losses in the coax cable are quite high and sometimes what you gain with the antenna can be lost in the cable.
The AR150 is considerably slower than the AR300M in terms of processor speed so it all depends on your usage.
If you are getting a good signal outside you should not need the external antenna so could use your AR300M (no microwave losses!). You could do an improved version of what I did and put the AR300M in a plastic food box, run an ethernet cable down into the house. Have the cable coming out of the bottom so water cannot get in, and if it does it can run out. You could possibly save a bit by also running a cable for power instead of the POE injector and splitter, I am not sure.
Then an AR300M-lite in the house perhaps although an AR150 would work.
Putting the lite in the box would be slightly more flexible as you would then have a LAN ethernet connection free in the house, but you would need to build a custom image with LEDE/OpenWrt Image Builder to switch the lite’s single ethernet to LAN and turn on the radio in STA mode. Very easy to do and teaches you a lot about LEDE/OpenWrt!
A nice do it yourself budget project

CuriousJor · 2018-03-31T20:01:18.322Z

Thanks, I will give that a try! I appreciate the input!

nonames · 2020-01-01T18:27:30.792Z

Could you make it work?
I would want to use an external antenna as well.
Also have 5GHz.

alzhao · 2020-01-02T07:08:33.670Z

Old thread.

If you want to connect an external usb wifi dongle to the router, you need to install wifi driver for the dongle. If the dongle uses 3070 or 8187 wifi dongles it should already worked.

If you have newer wifi dongles, e.g. those with 5G wifi, it may be difficult to install driver. We are working on some type of wifi dongles and will use that on our MV1000 first.