True Repeater?

[kickdown at web.de]

Hello!

I am currently writing on a thesis and try to find some 
on-the-edge-of-the-standard solutions to spontaneously extend radio coverage 
in a campus-wide network (WDS is not an option, unfortunately).

One of my ideas is: setting up a device to act as a true repeater, that is: 
listen on the antenna for all incoming frames, and directly after receiving 
them push them back into the ether, unmodified. This would of course lead to 
lots of duplicate packets, but that is not a major problem at the moment. The 
question is: would it work? Can you listen to and then retransmit, say, a 
beacon frame? Would that break the timing of the beacon timestamp? Does the 
firmware permit it (after all, that would mean sending a packet but not 
putting the own MAC in place of the Transmitter adress)? Are there other 
drawbacks that make this attempt impossible?

Sorry for the punishment of asking stupid questions :-)

Stefan Winter

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