DD-WRT and Getting the Man Cave up to Speed

I recently converted my crummy, old, detached garage into a man cave and found that my Linksys 802.11N router in my house had a low signal going to the man cave. I tried moving the router from a low spot up to the top of a high bookshelf and that made things a little better, but I still was losing signal with some of my devices. I thought about buying a 150 foot Cat6 ethernet cable and burying that, but that was a lot of work when there was a much easier wireless solution.


I knew that I could convert a regular router with DD-WRT into a wireless repeater bridge, allowing me to build a wireless bridge to my current router, acting as if I was plugged directly in with an ethernet cable. I saw the deal on Fatwallet for the Belkin Sharemax 3000 and read I could flash it with DD-WRT. It was only $22 on Expansys and with the 2 USB ports and gigabit ethernet, I thought it was a great deal. I had gift card and got it off of Amazon, but $30 and free shipping was still a good deal. Spending $30 for my wireless solution was also a lot cheaper than spending $106 on a wired solution.

I followed the directions here to flash the router with DD-WRT.  I then followed the directions here to turn the Belkin router into a wireless repeater bridge.  After successfully connecting the two routers, I can now plug into the ethernet ports for my desktop in the man cave and connect my tablets, phones, and laptops wirelessly and not lose signal anymore.  It's handy too because they are all also on the same subnet, so it's truly like I'm hardwired in, except I didn't have to bury cables in the yard.  I am limited to the 300 mbps limit of the Wireless-N and don't get Gigabit, but that will be enough for my needs.