This is what I have already done. And yes it works.
The main router is a zyxel zywall USG 300, it has a 100/100 Mbit fiber connection. And then a LAN network in the area. I have then created two WLAN points as I am describing below.
AP1 is in AP mode on ch6 with a 9dbi antenna, and AP2 is a "wireless client" connected to AP1 with a 8dbi antenna. Distance between those two is about 50 meters, throughput has been tested and is about 30Mbit.
From AP2 I have a LAN cable of about 20meters, and then the AP3 is in AP mode on ch1 with a 8dbi antenna. The throughput on AP3 is about 50% of the throughput I get between AP1 and AP2. But I now have two WLANs covering a mixed area with small wood houses. If you are outside I cover the whole area, that is about 100-150meter radius, but as it is indoors, people using laptop, ipads, smartphones, both WLANs cover about 50-100 meters depending on where you are at, objects in the way of the signal and so on.
Reason for not using repeater mode, for me, it was not stable, and cased problems where the APs would hang, had to be reset, lost configuration etc. I also had to use power cycle timers on all APs in order to prevent failure, if one of the locks up, it will be rebooted every day, so no permanent downtime. The upside with my type of setup, is that you can add even more APs especially if you have the main AP in the center of the circle radius, you could add several APs in "wireless client" mode, and connecting another AP to each one of them, running in AP mode.
The problem with "repeater mode" is that for each repeater you "flood" the network with trash traffic, the maximum is something like four repeaters but then your network is so slow or has so much traffic loss it will probably not work much at all. But it is up to you what you want to try out.
Oh, the hardware was HW_C1 and firmware v3.02
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Topic: Stringing Repeaters (Read 3110 times)