How does a Wi-Fi extender work? Let’s say if a certain location has a signal of -50dBm, how does adding an extender at that exact location boost the signal around it?
In: Technology
going on your example, say your location has a path attenuation of -50dBm, and the repeater (which is really just an amplifier) has a gain of 30dBm, and it’s placed at the location where the signal of the original signal reaches -25dBm (not actually physically halfway due to the inverse square law). the signal attenuates -25dBm from the router to the repeater, gets amplified back up to +5dBm, and then travels from the repeater to the target, losing 25dBm, and arriving with -20dBm, a saving of 30dBm. This is significant because most coding schemes scale non-linearly in efficiency against SNR.
As for how they work, they essentially create a new network with the identical SSID of the router, so that any connected devices can’t tell the difference between the router and repeater. it accepts traffic as if it were the router, and just passes the messages over to the router.
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