Long Range Wi-Fi – Pushing 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi to the limits (2019)

"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...

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.

Not one Pringles can utilized. We have failed to pass along the ancient knowledge.

If you are trying to go point to point over a long distance, I would consider something like the unifi air fiber products. They've got a 60ghz model that is basically like a direct optical link. 15km+ no problem.

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.

I had great success with biquad cantennas! Yagis are potentially better but so hard to tune/match.

As a layman, is this supposed to be impressive when any phone can connect to Starlink direct to cell service for messaging, light browsing and even audio?

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.

I am still reminded of early WiFi and ways to extend it with Cantenna or foil backed contraptions made out of cardboard.

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.

I wonder why the yagi fell off so suddenly. It had pretty good height.

Not about range, but speed. Wifi is surprisingly slow. I noticed downloading a model from the internet (Huggingface) to my Desktop (connected by LAN cable) is faster than copying it from said Desktop to the laptop in the same room via Wifi.