Extending the range

Well the wireless bridge was fun, but also limited. With some prompting from my online technical support team (thanks J3r3my), the wireless connection over to Kendra's laptop is now a Universal Wireless Repeater (UWR).
	The photo to the left is from my crawlspace under the house. The wireless DLink router and the Motorola cable modem are set up here. This provides wired access to my desktop computer on the other side of the house and wireless access to the WRT54G Linksys via the external directional antenna which is pictured on the right. The previous configuration only allowed a connection to the router via an ethernet cable. This was somewhat limiting given that the laptop has wireless capability. In order to set the girls free to roam about their new abode (almost wrote adobe there), we set out to find a better way to get them wireless once again. The instructions for setting up the UWR are here. The external antenna you see here on the right was purchased online at ebay from Data Alliance. The quality of the wireless signal has gone from around 12% up to over 35%.
Now the girls are free to roam about. In fact, if they sit out on their patio, they can pick up the signal direct from my antenna without the use of the repeater. We are now free to move the router as well. The final resting place for the router will be in a "window with view". I was a little surprised that my laptop while behind the directional antenna still receives a very strong signal. Here is a diagram showing the output of the antenna. When configuring the DD-WRT firmware for UWR on the WRT54G router (wow that's a busy sentence, eh?) I found that in order to create a connection using encryption, both routers had to use the same encryption and the same encryption key. I am not certain that this was the factor that made the final connection successful, but that is the way it is set up now and it works. Enabling the web gui access to the control panel allows me to monitor the UWR router from my desktop computer (on the DLink network) even though it is on a unique subnet.