Topic: Any way to boost the gamepad to Wii U distance?

Wanted to know if theres a possible signal booster, and would water (like a fish tank) block the signal a little?

Yeah i was wondering the same thing for some reason the Wii U game pad has real trouble receiving a signal from my bedroom which is directly above the living room

Could have metal pipes blocking it

Get a really, really long extension cord for your Wii U.

Yeah I'm also curious about this as it stops working on the landing(point on the stairs whers its flat because the stairs start going in a different direction it's about a midway down stairs) of the stairs leading downstairs from my bedroom. and I would love to use the gamepad in my living room which's stopping point is is just about 15ft away into the far end of room.

When my console was in the corner of the living room, down by the TV, the signal wouldn't reach any further than that room. I bought a really really long extension cord and placed the console in a prominent position. Now it works in every room of the house, on both floors.

Not only is it not possible, the hardware for it doesn't exist, but if it was it wouldn't work as well as you'd expect. There is a reason why all of the articles on WiFi range extenders spend all their time talking about how its not worth it. Your best and probably only option is to simply keep within range.

and yes, water does impact the signal. If you want to test this out compare the range you get facing the WiiU vs putting yourself between the Wii U and GamePad.

Hmm it's very tempting to just put the Wii u in my hallway so it'll reach everywhere ill try moving it on the other side of the fish tank cause I can go onto the couch in the living room then

You can also be well within the quoted distance in a straight line but if the signal has to pass at any angle less than 90 degrees through a wall the greater, then the apparent wall thickness is and the greater the signal loss... throw in four internal brick walls, two at angles around 60 degress to the signal and even at 20ft my thoughts of bedroom gaming are just a dream unless there's some kind of repeater available...

Make several FCC non-compliant (read: illegal) modifications to both the Gamepad and Wii U transceivers. Note that simply boosting the power output is no good, as this also increases the amount of noise in the signal. You don't necessarily want a strong signal - you want a CLEAR signal.

A particularly enterprising individual might try reverse engineering the IR transceiver (a violation of the EULA) and replacing it with a WiFi transceiver with the appropriate hardware interface to trick the Gamepad and Wii U into thinking it is an IR transceiver.

On range extenders in general. The reason why it's not a great idea is because using them halves the available bandwidth. Because the problem with the Wii U GamePad at range is a drop in bandwidth and it needs a lot of bandwidth to work well (hence using the 5Ghz band) an extender wouldn't be a great idea. If there was going to be an official accessory to boost range it would probably be a USB dongle with a better antennae not a range extender.

Except the GamePad uses a modified version WiFi to communicate with the Wii U already. IR is only used for the TV remote functionality, WiiMote pointers via the sensor bar and (potentially) communication with IR accessories. The GamePad uses a specialised version of WiFi in the 5Ghz band.

If you were to mod it you'd find the right transceiver in the Wii U (there are two, one's for WiFi the other for GamePad) and run antennae wires out the back. Then you'd get a high quality WiFi antennae and place it in a location central to your Wii U GamePad usage....... but IMO this would be overkill, a waste of effort and money.

That would probably explain why I was so confused about how the gamepad could cram an HD stream over an IR signal. I was thoroughly impressed that Nintendo had made it possible, but it makes much more sense that they are using WiFi for that.

Still, range and bandwidth is limited by the fact that most of the airwaves are reserved for certain uses by the FCC. If you ignore that (and could somehow mod your devices to take advantage of that), I bet it would be technologically possible to extend the range of the Wii U gamepad. It might be dangerous to your health, sure, but it should be possible to send that amount of data over the air.

5Ghz is the best public frequency that's medium range and high bandwidth. Stuff like 60Ghz is much higher bandwidth but useless for range, 2.4Ghz is good for range but is crowded and not as high bandwidth. 5Ghz is the middle ground. It's the fact that it's 5Ghz that limits the range of the Wii U GamePad more than anything else.