Hawking HWUR54G Wireless G Universal Range Extender

1. John Britton Jr. / Aug 29 2010

   

   Review by John Britton Jr. for Hawking HWUR54G Wireless G Universal Range Extender Rating: This extender ends up as a SECOND wireless network, with a different SSID than the network you’re extending. This wasn’t obvious (at least to me) from either the product descriptions or the the documentation. Hawking should be more clear – it’s as simple as stating “this product works by creating another wireless network in your home, and that network has a different SSID”. Why does this matter? Because I am unable to get either my laptop, running Windows XP Pro, or my PDA, running Windows Mobile 2003, to smoothly transition from one network to another when moved about the house. In both cases manual intervention is required, and in the case of the PDA I actually have to delete the network settings I don’t want to connect to and add new settings for the one I do. Perhaps there’s a better way to configure these devices, but I haven’t found it. If you end up connecting only to the extender you should be fine, but I find that if I’m too close to either the WAP or the extender, I have to connect to a different SSID for reliable communications.
2. M. Brooks / Aug 29 2010

   

   Review by M. Brooks for Hawking HWUR54G Wireless G Universal Range Extender Rating: I purchased this range extender for my home network. I’ve got a Linksys router on one side of my house, upstairs, and I always got a low signal on the other end of my house, downstairs. The Linksys range extender did not work with my older Linksys router, and the dLink would work, but you had to do a lot of configurations to get it working.

   Therefore, the fact that the new Hawking range extender could be used for every type of network was a big selling point. The box and documents say all you have to to do is configure the range extender by entering your SSID and channel from your wireless network, put the range extender within your wireless network coverage, and plug it in. The range extender will pick up your existing network and extend it within an area of coverage for the range extender.

   The problem I had was configuring the range extender. You first connect a network cable between the range extender and any computer you want to use to configure the range extender. I first had a problem with keeping a network connection. Then I had a problem getting the configuration site to pop up. I worked and worked with no success. Finally I tried it using the Internet Explorer browser rather than my AOL browser. When I did that, it worked, I configured the range extender in a few minutes, and was up and running. Once you get the configuration screen, all you do, as advertised, is enter the SSID and channel for your network, and the range extender extends it.

   Once I got it configured, the range extender has worked like a charm. It sits unobtrusively on one of my tables, and the wireless signal strength has always been excellent since I started using it. So I’ve gone from a low signal to an excellent signal.

   So I’m very happy with the product; once configured, it works as advertised. The wireless card in my laptop picks up both my wireless network and the range extender network. Since the range extender network has such a stronger signal, my laptop locks onto its signal and I cruise away in the wireless world.
3. Perry Donham / Aug 29 2010

   

   Review by Perry Donham for Hawking HWUR54G Wireless G Universal Range Extender Rating: I bought and set up a HWUR54G in order to take care of some dead spots in my wireless coverage. It works fine, however I feel that the packaging is misleading.

   The unit is not just a repeater, it’s a repeater coupled with an access point. There doesn’t appear to be a way to turn off the AP and just use the unit as a repeater. This means that you will essentially set up a second wireless network, with a different name, and you wireless devices will have to choose which network, your original or the new, to connect to.

   If you are willing to live with this limitation, then it isn’t a bad unit. Throughput seems fine, and signal strength is good. It took about ten minutes to set up from a Linux laptop; I did not use the setup wizard but instead opened the web-based setup page directly.

   It does help to have some knowledge of networking to set the unit up. The documentation is pretty sparse and oversimplifies things to the point where you have to rely on your own experience.
4. Opinion_Sharer / Aug 29 2010

   

   Review by Opinion_Sharer for Hawking HWUR54G Wireless G Universal Range Extender Rating: Once you get this unit up and running, you’ll love it. But budget about twice as much time as you might expect to configure it. Here’s a list of problems I ran into:

   1. Every time you change the ANY of the configuration settings, the unit resets itself and leases a new DHCP address (see #5 below). If you’re not looking at your DHCP table when you set this up, you’re going to lose the connection in your web browser and, like other reviewers, assume that the unit doesn’t work. Unfortunately, DHCP is the FIRST setting which the included configuration wizard asks you to set — very poor software design. It’s best to use a fixed IP address on the same subnet. Fortunately, most home networking vendors — not all — use the same private class C range as the default address Hawking wants you to use (if you don’t know what this means, read up on basic TCP/IP before you buy).

   2. The default SSID, which you should change immediately, is “HAWKING EXTENDER” and will look like another network in your client settings. I have encountered other “HAWKING EXTENDER” WLANs in my travels and it causes problems if your client device is set with the default name. This makes moving from place to place in your house more difficult than it should be but this is more of a shortcoming of 802.11 than of this product.

   3. The firmware out of the box only supported WEP. Setting up WEP was very difficult and frustrating but I managed to do it. Upgrading the firmware simply wouldn’t work from one of my PCs and I had to use a different machine. The firmware upgrade routine warns you that the default IP address of the unit will change after the upgrade. It didn’t for me, but the new address would have been on a different subnet.

   4. The documentation is not helpful in addressing any of these problems and I found that it was difficult to find any useful help in on-line forums. To be fair, the docs DO warn that using the default, static TCP/IP address is recommended, but they don’t tell you why.

   5. The documentation instructs you to hook the unit to the network port of your PC and run the configuration wizard. I tried two different PCs and this still didn’t work. Because I had to use my broadband router, I ran into the DHCP problem. I suspect that my first PC, a notebook, didn’t work because it was connected to my wireless LAN. If you have a software firewall you might also have problems (again, no mention of this in the docs).

   I have found that setting up wireless devices is sometimes harder than it should be and this particular device has a few extra quirks. But now that it’s up & running, I have to say that it is really a great addition to my home network. If you have an out-of-the-box generic and unsecured network you might not have these problems and you’d probably give this product 5 stars. If I didn’t have to configure it myself, that’s what I would have done.
5. J. Grey / Aug 29 2010

   

   Review by J. Grey for Hawking HWUR54G Wireless G Universal Range Extender Rating: I was reluctant to buy it because the reviews about setup were so bad.

   But I was able to get it going in a few minutes. It works flawlessly. I also bought a Hawking antenna, the best wifi antenna I ever bought.

   I am able to repeat ANY wifi signal, hook up any standard SMA antenna, WITHOUT access to the original wifi spot hardware or login info.

   (…)

Comments are closed.