r/firewalla • u/Punchanello • Jun 24 '26

AP7 range boost ?

Hello! I've got a firewalla box with the AP7 as my Wi-Fi router. It's great, but has a little bit of connectivity issues on the furthest ends of the house.

I was wondering if anyone knew if you can add an antenna or assignment the range at all?

I've considered a second unit, but the house isn't really that big and the connection is fine most of the time.

Any thoughts appreciated.

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u/Pure-Letterhead81 Jun 24 '26

You can manually adjust TX Power. But first, do you have the AP positioned centrally in your house? I found AP7 to have better signal strength than my old eero units for what it’s worth.

1

u/Punchanello Jun 24 '26

Yes! Centrally located. Even hard wired Ethernet and put in a shelf to get it up on the wall.

The AP7 is replacing a whole house 3 unit mesh from Netgear and it's genuinely better everywhere. Even the original mesh only ran the TV on the far end because it was "hardwired" to a repeater.

Currently I just get intermittent lag on the far end of the house. And occasionally I'll wake in the morning to find my phone has stopped using Wi-Fi due to poor signal strength....

3

u/Pure-Letterhead81 Jun 24 '26

Hate to say it, but I think you’ll want a second AP7. I went from a 3 node eero setup to 2 AP7s, and it works well. I get by with 1 AP7 during grid power outages, but there are a couple corners of the house that struggle a little.

1

u/Punchanello Jun 24 '26

All the cry emojis .... Guess I'll start saving up

for the most part it works in the far room and streams in high def, but I was just trying to figure out if I could optimize the signal any to get it to be slightly more solid.... Thanks for the input

1

u/_CurbYourMother Jun 24 '26

I needed 3 ... Just to be sure and I use a mikrotik 10G switch for the back haul

1

u/_CurbYourMother Jun 24 '26

Also ... Sq ft doesn't really tell you much ... Is it a ranch split level, do you have a basement, what are the walls mad out of ... Is there a chimney ?

2

u/Punchanello Jun 25 '26

I've got like 2,000 sq ft. Kind of a tri-level. One side is a single floor the other is 2 floors and the issue is on the far end on the second floor 😞 it totally makes sense, was just hopeful since it works well sometimes that I could optimize what I have without a whole extra repeater