How to Use Range Up: From Floor Plan to Extender Spot in 5 Minutes

You have one room that drops calls and a vague plan to buy an extender. Range Up turns that into a decision in about five minutes: sketch the place, mark where the router really sits, name the room that matters, and let the app rank every outlet-sized tile in the plan against it.

Here is the whole flow — including the two steps people rush, and the one almost everybody skips.

The five minutes, mapped out#

The editor is a four-step wizard. A chip at the top tells you where you are — Draw 1 of 4, Router 2 of 4, Target 3 of 4, Extender 4 of 4 — and you can walk back and forth between steps without losing anything.

One thing to be clear about before you start: none of this touches your network. Range Up does not scan for SSIDs, does not read your live signal, and does not run a speed test. It is arithmetic over the walls you drew — which is exactly why it can rate an outlet you have never plugged anything into.

Step 1: get the walls down#

From the home screen, New plan offers two routes. Blank plan opens a grid size sheet: width from 12 to 60 cells, height from 10 to 50, and up to five floors. Starter layouts hands you a pre-drawn plan you adapt instead.

One grid cell is about a meter, a little over three feet. The toolbar gives you three tools — Wall, Door, Erase — and that is the entire vocabulary. Draw the exterior outline first, then the interior walls, then punch doors into them.

That short list of tile types tells you what the simulation reads. It traces a straight line from each radio to every square on the plan and adds up the loss of the tiles that line crosses: a wall costs the full wall-loss figure, a door costs a small fraction of it, open floor costs nothing but distance. So doorways and wall count decide your map, while furniture, room labels and cabinetry are invisible to it.

You do not need a tape measure for any of this — pacing the rooms out gets you close enough, because proportions matter far more than exact dimensions. If your problem is upstairs, set the real floor count now rather than later; mapping a multi-floor home covers stacking and stairwells.

Step 2: put the router where it really is#

Tap Next: Router, then tap the canvas where the box actually lives. Not centered, not where the diagram in the manual put it — in the hall closet by the front door, on the floor behind the TV, on the shelf in the utility room. The truth.

The heatmap fills in the moment you place it, with the six legend chips along the canvas. Check one thing before you move on: the squares immediately around the router should be cyan for a few cells in every open direction. If they are not, you have drawn a wall on top of the router or set a material heavier than your construction. What the rest of the colors mean is covered in reading the coverage heatmap.

Now spend thirty seconds on the cheapest experiment in the app. Drag the router to two or three other places it could legally live — the length of its cable, another coax or fiber outlet, one shelf higher — and watch the map. Moving a router can recover 10 dB or more and costs nothing, and if that turns your problem room green you are done. Router placement is the fix people skip on their way to buying hardware.

Step 3: mark the target location#

The prompt says you can tap the canvas to mark the location you want to improve, or tap Next to skip. Do not skip it. This is the step that separates a nice picture from an answer.

Without a target, the search has only one thing to optimize: total covered area. Coverage rewards a position that lights up a hallway, a stairwell and two closets, and you did not open the app because the hallway was slow. With a target, every candidate position is scored by how much it lifts that one square, and the results screen gains a target-room reading in dBm that you can actually judge.

Pick the tile where the device sits, not the doorway you walk through: the desk, the side of the bed, the couch cushion you sit on. One spot, one room. If two rooms genuinely matter, run the plan twice and compare, because a single position optimized for two opposite corners is usually mediocre at both.

Step 4: run the placement search#

Tap Next into the extender step. You can tap any open tile to place a candidate yourself, or take the app's recommendation — it offers a suggested spot with an estimate of what that position could do for your target.

Underneath, the search sweeps open tiles across every floor and asks two questions about each one:

1. Can it hear the router well enough to be worth repeating? A candidate is only worth using where the router still reads about -60 to -67 dBm at that tile. Below roughly -70 dBm at the extender, it rebroadcasts a weak signal strongly and your phone clings to it.
2. How much does it lift your target? Candidates are ranked by that gain. Read the gain for what it is, though: a repeated signal is never as good as the same reading straight from the router, because everything behind a single-radio unit gives up roughly half its throughput to the second hop.

A few Planner Settings are worth knowing before you run it:

• Planned extenders defaults to one. Raise it if you are planning a mesh set rather than a single plug-in unit — but keep real hardware to no more than two wireless hops from the router, because chained repeaters halve throughput at each hop.
• Prefer wall placement biases suggestions toward wall-side tiles, which is where outlets are. Leave it on unless it starts refusing to find anything.
• Material preset, along with the wall, door and floor loss values, is where accuracy lives. An ordinary interior partition runs about 3-8 dB at 5 GHz, brick or block 10-16 dB, reinforced concrete 15-25 dB. Getting one of those wrong outweighs every room dimension in your sketch — see telling the app about your walls.

Reading the result, and when it says do not buy#

View Results gives you a Before/After toggle over the map and two tiles: Coverage, the share of open floor at or above -67 dBm, and Target room, the predicted level at your marked spot before and after. Try Another Spot lets you move the candidate and read both again.

One rule for reading it: judge the target-room after value, not the coverage percentage and not the size of the gain. A room that moves from -85 to -71 dBm gained 14 dB and still breaks up on calls. A room that moves from -70 to -58 dBm gained less and now works. The full thresholds are in what size of gain is worth paying for.

Three results mean stop shopping:

• The best candidate lifts your target by less than about 10 dB. Placement is not your constraint. Move the router on the plan and start over from a better baseline.
• Nothing on the path between router and problem room beats about -67 dBm. There is nowhere to stand a repeater — every spot with reach into the room has no link home, and every spot with a link home has no reach. That is a job for a cable or a relocated router, not a second radio.
• The room needs sustained throughput. A single-radio extender roughly halves what devices behind it get. A video call at 1.5-3 Mbps each way survives that easily; a 4K stream at 15-25 Mbps or an all-day camera upload often does not, even with a perfect dB number.

Saving the plan and checking it in the real house#

The home screen keeps your work with an updated timestamp: Continue Plan picks up where you left off, Start New Plan begins another, Delete Saved Plan clears the local draft. Get the layout drawn and correct before you start experimenting with materials or router positions, so a bad experiment never costs you the hardest part of the job. Everything stays on the device — no account, no upload, no Wi-Fi scanning permission. Most of that flow is free: drawing, the material settings, the router, the target, the heatmap, 2D and 3D, multi-floor plans, and the one saved plan on the device. Range Up Premium adds placing extenders yourself, revealing the recommended spot, and the Before / After results screen with the estimated gain.

Then do the last step in the real house. Plug the unit into the outlet the app picked, give it two minutes to settle, and test in the target room with the activity that made you care — start the video call, play the 4K stream, sit where you actually sit. If the room improved but is still marginal, move one outlet toward the router and retest. The app is on the download page, and the placement reasoning behind all of this is collected on the extender placement page.