Wireless Bridge for Campground WiFi

It has become common for a hotel to offer free WiFi in hotel rooms. In fact, it's generally expected that a hotel room will offer either WiFi or cabled internet in the room, at no extra charge, and many RV parks are starting to do the same. At first, a few enterprising parks installed systems that you paid for by the hour, or the day, but more and more parks are offering internet service at no charge with little security, making connections very easy.

While RV parks appear to be moving toward easier access, one on-going problem is not likely to go away. That's the problem of acquiring adequate signal strength for reliable communications with the internet connection. In many cases it's simply a distance issue. Parks are large compared to the footprint of a hotel, and covering an area as large as many RV parks can get quite expensive and technically very difficult for the operator.

The other problem that won't go away under any circumstance is large RVs blocking your signal. As you may know, WiFi communications operate at roughly 2.4 Ghz. That's near the lower end of the radar band, and squarely in the realm of microwaves. Communication at that frequency is strictly line of sight. If you are being blocked by several large RVs, and especially if any of those coaches have a metal skin, you are not likely to receive a signal. If you're lucky, you might get a small signal reflected from a random surface.

So, what's the Answer? Fortunately, there's a very good solution that is relatively inexpensive and easy to install. It's called a wireless bridge. A wireless bridge is a device that basically acts like a hard wired Ethernet cable, only via a wireless connection. Its function is exactly the same as a wired Ethernet cable, which is to connect a device such as a computer, router, switch, wireless access point, or other device to a network.

The wireless bridge by itself is not actually the answer. It's the fact that you can connect it to an outdoor antenna that makes this process so much more reliable than just turning on your laptop. Connected to an outdoor antenna, the wireless bridge can get a signal from above your coach where the signal is usually stronger and more direct. The outdoor antenna usually has more “gain” than the antenna on a typical laptop too, so your signal is likely to have more range. Gain is a measurement of the antenna's ability to direct and intensify a signal, so that a given signal's power appears to be higher than the transmitter's transmit power.

In its simplest form, a connection to the internet using a wireless bridge takes on the following form: Assume you're at a campground that has an unsecured wireless connection. From near the office, you can get a good connection with just your laptop's wireless connection. At your camp site, your signal strength weakens to the point that you cannot connect, or your connection is unreliable. Installing an outdoor antenna and a wireless bridge will often solve the problem.

To connect a wireless bridge, you must first install an outdoor antenna and a coax cable into the point where the wireless bridge will be located. After installing the antenna and connecting it to the bridge, it's time to set up the bridge. Administering a bridge works in much the same way as a router. The bridge usually has a static IP address (like 192.168.1.226), where you can access the administration menus and perform the setup. As a minimal setup, the bridge needs to be told which wireless system to connect with by performing a site survey. Once the survey is completed, you can select the wireless system you want to connect with, add any security that's necessary, and you're finished! From that point on the bridge acts like a wired Ethernet connection to your computer. This is, of course, an over simplification of the process because many bridges offer many different ways to accomplish the above tasks, but for the most part, following the directions that come with the bridge and connecting to a wireless network is simple.

One important thing to remember about wireless bridges is that even though they “handle” like routers in terms of how you interface with them, they are not routers. In this case, the point is that a router, when configured to do so, will assign an IP address to your computer, which gives you the ability to communicate on the network. In the case of a bridge, no IP address is assigned to your computer by the bridge, so you might end up having to assign a static IP to your computer for a brief period in order to set up the bridge. Be sure to assign an IP that's in the same “group” as the bridge. For example, if your bridge defaults to 192.168.1.226, then assign an IP of 192.168.1.100 (with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0). Default gateway information, DNS, and so on is not important for the purpose of setting up the bridge. Once the bridge is configured for the network you're using, you'll want to return the computer to dynamic IP address assignment, or the settings you were using before configuring the bridge.

The second method of connecting the bridge is through your wireless router. While this is only a bit more complicated, it adds a substantial amount of functionality to your installation. Start by connecting your bridge to the wireless network in the same fashion as above; by physically connecting to the bridge with a computer and configuring it to the wireless network you'll be using. Next, shut down the bridge and connect it to the WAN port on your router. In order for this to work, the IP address of the bridge needs to be in a different net, or group than the router. For example, if your router assigns IP addresses to your network at 192.168.0.1-100, and your bridge is at 192.168.1.226, then you should be good. But, if your router uses internal addresses in the range of 192.168.1.xxx, AND your bridge is set to the same range (192.168.1.???), you'll need to change one. It's usually easiest to set the bridge to something different, like 192.168.3.???. The point is, things that are plugged into the WAN port of your router, in order to work correctly, need to be set to something different than the IP addresses being assigned by your router to your internal network devices.

By installing the bridge to the back of a router, your now have the ability to set up multiple computers on your own network. You can file share, printer share, and keep everything secure behind a physical firewall that's built into your router. The thing to remember about this article is that everything described here is a simplification of the overall process. There are so many routers, bridges, and antenna systems that can be combined that trying to describe exact, step-by-step instructions would be impossible. Remember, though, that the manufacturers of these systems do indeed provide step-by-step instructions. If you understand the concept, the process should be easy.