Question about wireless bridge vs hub vs adapter vs ?

D10 · April 20, 2023

Hello

I am planning to buy Melco N50. Unfortunately it will be on my 3rd floor and there is no way I can provide ethernet cable from the first floor where is my computer and router located (my house is very old) What should I buy to get wireless signal from my router and convert it to RJ-45 on 3rd floor so Melco can have connection with my computer?

Thanks

Dan

Blackmorec · April 21, 2023

Hello Dan,

My modem and router are on the ground floor and my hi-fi system is on the first floor across some stairs. I live fairly close to 3 appliance stores so I was able to trial many different approaches. My first was running a ethernet cable bungee style, just thrown over the stairs. I tried both the regular consumer grade cable and then some Synergistic Research Active SE, which sounded much better. I then compared a range of wi-fi based strategies including Internet over Powerlines, which was better that I expected, Wi-fi mesh from 2 vendors and finally a wi-fi bridge/extender from TPLink, the RE650. The RE650 was the clear winner, even better than the SR Active SE cable, which told me that my system needed the isolation from the modem and server that wi-fi brings. I had the RE650 set up as 5GHz only, polling off, with my hi-fi as the only client.

I then added a TPLink 3 band router in place of the all-in-one ISP modem/router and dedicated one band solely to audio. So I literally had a single wi-fi channel with no traffic other than the audio system. It worked great. The RE650 is a consumer device that plugs into the wall socket, correctly orienting the antennae and getting 230V which it then rectified and down regulated to 5V DC for the actual radio/receiver. Of course the units picks up vibration from the wall, vibration from the internal power supply rectifier and transformer and the DC produced is probably noisy, given the cheap-as-chips switched mode power supply.

So I stripped out the power supply and wall plug and replaced it with a DC barrel connector socket, wired directly to the circuit board with Mundorf Silver/Gold Cable. I then built an anti-vibration wall mount so I could maintain the antennae orientation without all the wall vibration. I attach the RE650 to the mount using a single point mount, which is easy to unclip. The unit is suspended on 4 untensioned o-rings. I have used several generations of Sean Jacobs DC power supplies, currently an ARC6 DC4 Mini with a Mundorf Silver/Gold JSSG360 DC cable.

The pictures show the finished bridge with its wall mount, the wall mount itself and the cheap-as-chips power supply that the ARC DC4 replaced. As a part of an equally well optimized network the results were quite stunning, giving a beautiful and highly energetic 4 dimensional rendition of musicians playing instruments in a venue.