signal Repeaters / amplifiers

I'm brand new to wireless networking so forgive me if there are many threads on this topic. I just dont know what I ought to be looking for.

My question is this: I live not far from a public hotspot. Close enough my laptop logs on in most rooms of the house. My wifi phone though has more trouble. It finds the signal and connects but drops out really easily if I move about.

can I put a repeater in the home to capture and rebroadcast the signal? If so what should I buy and what kind of specifications should I be taking notiice of.
Thanks

There are two kinds of wireless range extenders:

Store and forward, AKA WDS

In-band repeaters.

You don't want store and forward for VoWLAN ( WiFi Phone ). Store and forward captures data packets headed one way, stores them in memory, then repeats them. Then it does the same thing for packets headed in the other direction. This causes a reduction in throughput. Massive delays, choppy bursts of data; incompatible with voice. Store and forward is a one-piece unit.

What you want is a bridge acting as a client for the hotspot, feeding an AP on a different channel. Data comes in one radio and goes out the other.

This also causes a reduction in throughput. But it does not cause delays and chop up the data stream at random.

You would want to set QoS ( Quality of Service ) in both bridge and AP, to give VoWLAN packets highest priority. A side effect of using an in-band repeater would be better reception for your laptop.

One of these:

Linksys wireless bridge

With one of these:

Panel antenna

Feeding one of these through a CAT5 cable:

Linksys AP

I would use a wireless router instead of an access point:

Wireless router

Wireless router does everything an AP does and much more.

Mark,
Thanks for this great answer!