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- I had great success with biquad cantennas! Yagis are potentially better but so hard to tune/match.by thenthenthen
- Wi-Fi with directional antennas can make long distance links easily.
Just have a look at the European Hamnet network: https://hamnetdb.net/map.cgi - There are a lot of hill-to-hill connections with 60-100km range and plenty of SNR left. Even a few links around 150km.
In professional context these super long links need a very very precise link budget planing to get enough 'nines' in their reliability rating. One of the reasons why you are not seeing them too often.
by BlackRabbit1 - My personal record was between Nieuwport and Zeebruge, as there was line of sight between the 2 sites.
Made some diy wifi antennas: waveguide, yagi, etc...
Back in the day used Radiomobile software to calculate the link budget between the receiver and the transmitter.
by zoobab - There is sub-GHz WiFi HaLow now which gets you to km distance without outrageously large antennas.by pantalaimon
- Completely unusable in Europe though due to ridiculously low duty cycles.by slow_typist
- I am still reminded of early WiFi and ways to extend it with Cantenna or foil backed contraptions made out of cardboard.
- And no passwords! That's how I got Internet as a broke college student living off campus.by NDlurker
- Used a cantenna and a PCI card with modified firmware to great effect when I only had WiFi for internet at the barracks in Japan in the 00's. I was absolutely outside of the legal limits on power, which I didn't really know at the time.
Extreme contention when 250 people had 3 APs as their only connection and half were trying to play WoW at the same time.
by CobaltFire - We had this ~20 years ago: We created a 3 node network (the center node was also acting as relay) with 4 yagis on rooftops. The distances between the nodes were 1.5 km and 800 m. We used this for around 3-4 years till ADSL became available at our places. Worked flawlessly in clear sky. In heavy rain or snow it was very slow though. We were electrical engineer graduates at that time and built most of it from scratch.by Dolfus
- I’m pretty sure I’ve connected to a bog-standard Mikrotik Metal over a thousand feet. The surprise wasn’t that it connected, it was that the phone could transmit back.by bombcar
- When we started wireless ISP in in early 200x, it was common to run 2.4 GHz links with 5+ km distance, having 24 dB antennas on each side. with the basic 17 dBm radio one was 20 dB over EIRP limit...
Here in Czechia, there was also another unlicensed band, 10.5 GHz, that has more sensible regulation - instead of EIRP limit, there was PA limit (power before antenna). So one can do long-range links with large enough antennas and most long range links was later converted to these. Unfortunately as this is local unlicensed band, radios for that were orders of magnitude pricier than generic wifi.
by zajio1am - I vaguely remember some sort of stunt where they had got hold of two 3 meter dishes paired them with off the shelf wifi radios, mounted one on a pickup truck and drove out across a dry lake bed. 53 miles before signal loss is what I remember.
I will probably never be able to find the source, and my poor memory probably inflated the range like any good fish story.
by somat - Yeah, I met Radio when he was at MIT. He got a black badge from Defcon for it.by fragmede
- This are however just records. E.g. "I still have a connection".
These records aren't really usable in real-life, e.g. to view a movie. When it rains, or is foggy.
Just mounting a maneuvering 3 m dish to your laptop isn't everyones most desired leisure ...
- I shot a 2.4 GHz path over 24 miles at 100 Mbps using Ubiquity bullets and their grid pack dishes. It's not that hard.by zikduruqe
- by d0vs
- Not one Pringles can utilized. We have failed to pass along the ancient knowledge.by bradleybuda
- Not a Senao 802.11a pcmcia card in sightby walrus01
- They address that they were looking at the maximum unlicensed power.
In HAM circles some people do use WiFi in an arguably legal manner by making the SSID their callsign and either making the network open or putting the password somewhere public. This is because you are not allowed to use public bands for encrypted communications (with a carveout for satellite control, for obvious reasons).
I'm unsure what ranges can be hit with that setup, but I know it can be far enough that LoS due to curvature of the earth becomes a factor.
I do think just getting a wireless P2P bridge is easier and smarter and why this hasn't seen more use.
by CobaltFire - Are you sure you're not thinking of the authentication carveout? Remote control of repeaters and other devices can be authenticated, but not encrypted, AFAIK?by inigyou
- You can buy consumer wireless repeaters basically but the latency sucks
- > In HAM circles some people do use WiFi in an arguably legal manner by making the SSID their callsign and either making the network open or putting the password somewhere public.
And presumably also no SSL when browsing?
Part of why I never really understood the appeal to getting a ham license. Things like no encrypted communications really limits the utility.
Anything outside of talking to randoms on the open air, and you'll better served by the computer networking infrastructure where encryption is allowed, you can speak to anyone in the world anyway, and the medium (IE physical device) you're using is irrelevant.
by DaSHacka - "Ideal" isn't doing as much heavy lifting as I thought it would be in this article. This is a basic wardriving setup on flat ground.
Standard wifi is phy limited to ~1600m unless you can increase ack response time limit, otherwise retransmissions will be sent by the sender while ack's are being transmitted by the receiver.
Then, per friis equation, with enough power and antenna gain (it's the antenna gain that really matters) the limit is only obstructions/terrain. Get yourself high enough (mountains, planes, satellites, moons, etc), or bounce of an opportune reflector (planes, moon, aurora, meteors, ionosphere, rain, hail, etc), and there is no real limit, besides how big of an antenna you're willing to build in orbit :P
or just make the throughput really really really REALLY slow and ice your receivers with liquid He.
Hams make a game of it: https://www.arrl.org/files/file/WA50-Standings/Distance-Reco...
by kawfey - For discussion purposes just "WiFi" isn't doing much. I doubt typical AP<->phone 802.11ac on 5GHz can achieve >1km let alone 802.11ax/be on 6Ghz carrier, even 802.11n can only reach a few hundred meters with line-of-sight, sunny day, and no interference
Long range WiFi is a "solved" problem with 802.11ah with sub-Ghz carrier and can reach more than a km depending on bandwidth requirements
All that assuming tx power is within regulation, no enterprise grade antenna, and all with commercially available parts