Outdoor wifi antenna

I have a wifi surveillance system. A few of my cameras have a weak signal. I cant move the base unit inside the house, so I was wondering if anyone has any experience with a outdoor wifi antenna’s and how good do they actually work before I waste money on something that may not work for me.

Thanks

I would suggest just getting a WiFi extender. I have one in my shed for my weather cam that sits outside my shed.

I was looking into those, but I need something to put outside in the weather. That’s why I thought a outdoor antenna would be better.

If you want to play with antennas why not put a higher gain one on the router? Only need one and it’s indoors.

I like the extender idea. Which one are you using Hankster?

I can look at a higher gain antenna.

I cant put an extender outside.

I’m using the Netgear EX6100. What I like about it is that it has an ethernet port in it and I can hardwire my lightning detector directly to while using it for my wireless camera. Has not been a problem and has worked well.

Why does it need to be outdoors? In most cases you can put the extender inside on the wall closest to your cameras and that should make for a lot stronger signal for the cameras to pick up.

I need to check the frequency for the cameras to see if a regular wifi extender would work.

So a wifi extender will not work with my cameras. I talked to customer service. They recommended extending the antennas from the main unit to outside and higher.

Back to the drawing board and looking for antennas.

That doesn’t make any sense. A WiFi signal is a WiFi signal. The camera shouldn’t care what WiFi it connects to if it has the name and password.

Sounds like it’s not networked wifi, rather the cams connect wirelessly to the mothership (dvr).

That could be, I didn’t think of that.

Yes. The camera’s connect to a separate consol/dvr that is then connected to the internet through my router.

So to be clear, the cameras are not Wifi? They use a proprietary wireless scheme different from Wifi?

Strange.

Wireless of any type will always be flaky when it comes to security cams.
Use something like this if it is indeed Wifi: https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-NanoStation-locoM2-802-11b-Wireless/dp/B00V4P2CJM/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1501436788&sr=1-1&keywords=nanostation

I should have been more clear. They are wireless. You can get an outdoor antenna for it from the dvr. I forgot to get the frequency they run on. Ill get that and post it here.

So all there telling me is, the system runs on 2.4g

The dvr has its own built in wifi for the cameras so it wont use your home bandwidth. And there saying the wifi signal in encrypted so it doesn’t interfere with other wifi units. They say I could replace the 5db antennas with 9db, but I don’t think that’ll do much in my case.

I don’t think adding 4db really increases the strength or distance that much.

Thoughts?

Right. It’s not a very big change.

Consumer antenna gain claims (db numbers) are very questionable too :frowning:

And some people say wifi signals are directional. I don’t buy that either. If that was the case, not many home wifi routers would work.

They can be directional, but not if you are using the vertical stick omni-directional antennas typically used for wifi. Also the signals at that frequency bounce around pretty well, so you may be getting a good signal but it’s not travelling in a straight line from A to B.

They can be with an antenna setup to do that. You are dealing with a non-standard WiFi configuration though.

It would work better if you put the directional antenna on the DVR pointed at your access point rather than mess with your access point.

An example would be:
https://www.amazon.com/Alternative-Wireless-Pole-Mount-Directional-Antenna/dp/B003LY6VHI

Though they come in all types of shapes and sizes.