Need help with wireless network for DVR

In My Humble Opinion
1

This week, I decided to finally dump my land line. I was only using it to make calls about once a week, so what’s the point, right?

I’m happily thinking about all the stuff I can buy with an extra $20 a month or so, when I come home to turn on my TV. The Dish Network box is reminding me that I have to keep a phone line (or Internet connection) attached to my receiver/DVR in order to avoid a $5 monthly fee. Annoyed grunt.

The DVR is in a location where I cannot readily run an ethernet cable to it, so I’m thinking there must be some way to connect the box to my wireless network. Using the Google I find many people recommend getting a “wireless access point” like they use for their XBox 360 or whatever. I’m shocked to find the cost of these things dedicated for gaming cost upwards of $100 and more! The wireless router I use cost like, $35 or something.

I have found two things (one, two) which I think would work and don’t cost $150, but I want to make sure before I buy one. Am I on the right track here?

Also, why do these things seem to cost more than my wireless router? Is there some other box I can use that’s even cheaper than what I have found? Any advice would be appreciated.

2

I do exactly this by using 2 regular wireless routers (the cheapo ones) with one acting as a wireless bridge and not a router. I achieved this using custom firmware (dd-wrt) but I believe that Netgear routers support this out of the box if you use 2 Netgear routers.

3

It looks like the router I have (a Belkin 802.11g cheapo one) cannot act as a wireless bridge. It sounds like a software issue. How do I know whether any particular router can act as one?

(Yes, this is a long-winded way of doing my one bump in hopes of some more assistance.)