Subj : PoE Window Passthroug To : Ky Moffet From : Barry Martin Date : Sat Nov 29 2025 08:44:00 Hi Ky! > > > > > Not really ChitChat but as this is where we are ongregating. > > > > KM> Cuz we're all lost. > > > > But I was following Mike! > > > KM> Where's he going?? > > > I don't know but so far looking interesting! > > KM> Well, now we're lost! > > Nah: we're on an 'alternative route to our destination'! > KM> And possibly to an alternative destination! > "Are we there yet?!" KM> Where is "there" ?? There is adjacent to Here, in fact it as a addition of 't' how it got its identity. KM> [Much jeering from the peanut gallery, given I have a habit of KM> tossing my characters out in the middle of "where the heck are KM> we??" and leaving them to fend for themselves.] They should feel honoured: what other food has an art display room named after? Never heard of a potato gallery. Sure there's solariums for Sun and mausoleums for mouses (darn AI!) and foyers for then number four (really?!). > KM> Yeah, a lot of this stuff is sheer junk anymore. There's so much > KM> counterfeit and poor copies that a known source is necessity. The > KM> real test is did you get a good connection? > Right; and sometimes even with me as the consumer shopping from a good > source the source gets duped by a bad supplier. KM> Yeah. Frex, you gotta watch the "sold and shipped by". Exactly. Probably has some specific specification to ensure a bit of quality to match the selling company's reputation. KM> On Walmart's site, if it's not by Walmart, it's either junk, KM> stolen goods, or can't be returned. I didn't know that. I don't do much shopping at Walmart: decent-enough store (and I haven't seen the "Walmart People") but I have to drive by several other stores to get to it. KM> On Amazon, all that plus often used sold as new. So if it's KM> anything significant, either by Amazon or by a name brand store, KM> and you've gotta watch that what it tries to sell you actually KM> comes from that store! Yes, I've seen the news reports of Amazon repackaging and selling as new. Lots of "sorta depends" coming to mind: I look at a few items and can pick out the worn shirt. A repacked computer is a lot more difficult to determine if can only look at the carton. Someone doing that all day and their mind dozes off. Not faulting Amazon but more the people cheating (returned used diapers?? Really?). > As for my project: ready to go but being on hold: raining, then a couple > of days where very windy (had gusts to 50 MPH), today is Thanksgiving > and off to participation of a ritual of dissection and consumption of what > almost became the nation bird; tomorrow (Friday) maybe; weekend we're > predicted to get up to four inches of snow. KM> Ah, you got our used storm that blew on through a couple days KM> ago. Oh Goodie: second-hand snow flakes! Update: yesterday's and ths morning's forecast is for 8" along the Missouri border, 11" inches the Wisconsin border, and 8-10" here. Started snowing around 9 o'clock last night and continue to mid-day Sunday KM> We just got a dusting of snow last night. Up along the Hi-Line KM> got totally smackered. Seems like I'm getting the repackaged Hi-Line snow! > KM> Wait, is this a plug-on-each-end type thing? not just a sleeve?? > The plug-in-on-both-ends. KM> Ah. To minimize the hole? Well, more to eliminate a hole. The wire is flat and thin -- maybe three Index card thicknesses and an inch wide. Think a modification of ribbon cable. Open the window and screen, place the cable from inside to outside (or outside to inside!) and close -- I'm presuming gently so as to give the cable time to conform to the window shape and not guillotine through. > KM> The antenna, power brick, and router are all sealed units > KM> designed to be out in the weather for whole-house wifi (wired > KM> ethernet was a sad afterthought). I thought having the latter two > KM> outdoors was needlessly risky, so they are inside. Which > KM> necessitated a much longer ethernet cable but still needed a > KM> weatherproof plug. (A regular plug works, but is not > KM> weatherproof.) > Again me not knowing details I would think they would prefer Ethernet > over WiFi just because it is at least 2x faster (100 Mbps vs 54) and KM> Get with the century, Barry! Nowadays wifi is faster than KM> ethernet. The last number stuck in the dusty squishy grey matter is 54 Mbps. ....And I'm seen some rather slow transfer speeds even with Ethernet -- from commercial sources, how home sites. KM> https://homenetworkadmin.com/wireless-b-vs-g-vs-n-vs-ac-difference KM> / KM> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Generations > solid/stable -- no varying signal strength (like I have here!). OTOH KM> But that is sometimes a problem. And wifi is subject to blockage KM> by mass or metal. (My desert house, with chicken-wire-plaster KM> inside and out, was such a Faraday cage that I had to go outside KM> to use the cell phone.) The house originally had aluminum siding; for the AM/FM radios had to position the antennae to either be in the window or roughly lined up so the signal would go through the window. Strong/most local stations not as much of a problem as the signal probably went through the roof. (Oddly I don't recall TV issues -- maybe had cable all the time?) > the input is a wireless signal (satellite), so wireless signal in, > wireless signal out out makes sense. There's a missing detail in the > satellite signal is in a much different band. KM> Yeah, unrelated. And the app whines until you point the antenna KM> where it wants to point, and it sees what it wants to see. "Nope. Nope. Nope. Y--nope. YES! Nope." KM> However, I can't complain too much, because I'm supposedly paying KM> for 60M nonpriority, and I've been getting around 300M and best KM> case 475M. It's an amazing thing to see 1.4GB of Fedora updates KM> come across in 27 seconds. Wheeeeee! KM> Most web servers are capped around 100M, but apparently Fedora KM> Update is not. No idea. I can see the capping, which might have more to do with the super-old DZ type of device: (last I knew) computers' 'multitasking' was realy one process at a time just done really fast amongst the connections (your turn, your turn, your turn... back to you...). Maybe the multithreading and multiple cores gets around a lot of that but seems like there still would be only so much 'computer thinking' and connections at a time. > I probably would have designed to have an Ethernet output, with the > waterproof design (which is probably why they went with the sealed > -inside WiFi -- and I'm guessing the power supply is hard-wired) with an > optional WiFi into the Ethernet port. KM> I think you just designed nonsense If it works and make a profit! KM> The router is fairly ordinary, except that it provides PoE to the KM> antenna (hence the router's power brick is bigger than some KM> routers), and only has two ethernet ports. Which are fussy little KM> pricks that don't like some cables. I'm vaguely recalling some cables don't have whatever cable PoE uses (extracts?) for power. .. Actually amazes me one can plug power into an Ethernet port. Not so much new/current devices but old ones built before PoE was done (AFAIK). Oh: tangent time: some video adapters like passive DVI to HDMI are missing ground cables so some HDMI devices won't see the DVI monitor attached. KM> I got 'em to behave with the KM> cable of their choice, and now one goes direct to Silver and the KM> other to a switch, from which daisy-chains the other switch. It's KM> ugly, but given the Fedora box at the very arse end of the chain KM> gets the fastest speeds, it must work. Sometimes the pretty design is the worst! KM> Wifi speed is constrained by what chip the device has. The old KM> Lenovo laptop (and maybe Pony, which is a little newer) has ac so KM> it gobbles up all the bandwidth it sees. The other laptops only KM> have g or n so they are slow unless I plug in a cable. Or a newer KM> wifi dongle. Fortunately networking these days is smart enough to KM> use the fastest one it sees. I have limited experience (obviously) and have to look up the letters to be sure I'm getting what I think I'm getting -- they don't go in sequence: 802.11 a Good place to start b Well, I would have switched as a is 5 GHz and b is 2.4 -- maybe a = awesome and b = second-best. g What happened to c and the rest? n OK, maybe it's the Preparation H joke: you don't want the earlier options. ac Well, we found c, but why the a? ax Big skip! (And 'a' still tagging along.) be Now they're just screwing with me! ax had 6 GHz. KM> The Lenovo laptop (and no other) can just barely see wifi in the KM> other house -- sufficient to play music, not enough to watch KM> video. Since the other house now Has Its Uses, I'd like to get it KM> over there for when I am. I can think of a whole lot of potential factors: chip, antenna type, antenna orientation, transmission path. Back in the old days even the length of the component lead made a difference. (Heathkit pre-assembled some of their kit boards so us hobbyists wouldn't send IF [Intermediate Frequencies] in the wrong part of the band.) I have an old laptop of which I added a dongle because the internal one was mediocre at best. > > Which what?! Presuming 'multi-conductor cable': instead of the > > usual two or three wires (like for doorbell wiring) this has several -- > > I think my cable had eight. > KM> I thought ethernet cable always had eight. Phone is usually four. KM> Only two used for standard phone, but all four if you're on a KM> party line. I remember the bafflement when the phone guy came to KM> hook me up, it didn't work, and after much thrashing around KM> realized my owned equipment (rather, Ma Bell said that's so old KM> we don't want it back) had been on a party line and needed to be KM> rewired. And I seem to remember some systems use three wires -- GTE in Michigan?? My usual is the red/green pair is the telephone; black/yellow for 'Line 2' or supplies power for the pilot light in the Princess Telephone (probably other models had bulbs inside). The only thing I know about party lines is they were one shared phone line and who was supposed to answer was identified by a ring pattern: two short, one long is for Ky! > > Yup! The good news is I could run an Ethernet line from the Computer > > Room (also on the second floor) through the Storage Area and the > > adjacent wall of the Master Bedroom. The hardest part would be in the > > Storage Area because of, well, the storage! > KM> For what do you need ethernet in there? got someone chained in > KM> the basement we need to know about? :P > Shhh! Though he is a the life of the party at Halloween! Well, maybe > 'life' isn't the accurate term but that is the phrase! KM> "This place is dead!" "No it's not. The place is resting." To paraphrase the Monty Python sketch. > > There's something called 'mesh' which from initial glances seemed more > > for businesses or a huge house (mansion-sized). > KM> Yeah, mesh, repeaters, not sure where if any the difference. > OK, that was pretty much my thinking. For what I needed they seemed to > do the same thing, just with a bit of marketing thrown in. KM> Different type of speaking-to-router, I think. Possibly. Here I've got two WiFi routers set to bridge mode. Main one is up here in the Computer Room, the second one is new for the WiFi cameras in the 'radio dead' zone. The cameras work, the router works, just the Radio Monster chomps on the signal. Sometimes works fine, sometimes not at all, sometimes barely. Sometimes a different access point is better (per the camera's signal strength display) but later will die. C'mon warmer weather streak so I can swithc to the PoE! > KM> I asked TP-Link (I have four of their 8-port switches, and > KM> previous good experience with their tech support) and they > KM> recommended this: > KM> https://www.tp-link.com/us/deco-mesh-wifi/product-family/deco-x50- > KM> outdoor/ > Well they have two PoE ports on the bottom and this device also hangs > outside! What's StarLink's problem?! KM> Design by people who have never strung network cable. Pencil line on paper from Point A to Point B -- what's so hard?! > The WiFi 6 protocol you probably won't use - yet. For that kind of > device I'd spend a few extra dollars now so it doesn't become the > bottleneck in the future. KM> Some new devices use wifi 6. None of mine are near that new. My new router has WiFi 6 capabilities. Bought it off e-Bay as 'like new' for a super-good price on auction: I was the only one to bid so I got it at the starting price. It is barely used: I think the guy was doing something like I am: try this option and see if it fixes the connectivity issue. > > > .. WiFi Password `2444666668888888'. I get asked and say 12345678'! > > KM> > > "2444666668888888" is made up of one two, three four's, five six's.... > KM> Ah! > Sometimes the mid gets stuck! KM> In the middle! 666??!! > > KM> Forgot my password. > > Set it to 'incorrect'. Type in what you think your password is, the > > computer will respond "your password is incorrect": problem solved! > KM> LOL, I need to use that one. > I have a 2" ring binder of passwords and some connection instructions. > Also on the hard drive but if the computer misbehaves... (I know: if > the computer is mesbehaving what do I need a password for? Try on > another computer!) KM> I have the wifi password taped to the desk. If there's no one around to snoop no need to have hidden! > .. Math Joke! > How do you make seven even? > You take off the "s". KM> Ha! So if we keep the brain puzzlers simple.... ¯ ® ¯ BarryMartin3@MyMetronet.NET ® ¯ ® .... Math Joke! Algebra was easy for the Romans. X was always 10. --- MultiMail/Win32 v0.47 þ wcECHO 4.2 ÷ ILink: The Safe BBS þ Bettendorf, IA þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com (454:1/1) .