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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Operate under an amateur radio license (which overlaps with the WiFi bands) and you could run up to 1,500 watts. Couldn’t be used much for an actual network but if it was just an experiment to prove art if the possible with proper station ID could be fun.
Used to work at an evtol company and we used a plain ol router connected to a huge PoE antenna to connect to the vehicle which had some plain ol usb wifi antenna.
It was TCP/IP data streaming down and commands going up.
Demi-automonous testing at some 2km range. Worked great...
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.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] threadIn 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.
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.
I will probably never be able to find the source, and my poor memory probably inflated the range like any good fish story.
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 ...
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...
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
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.
I wonder how far that can go
I think I have an ancient wireless phone on 900mhz and all my weather sensors are on 900mhz
https://www.digikey.com/en/articles/unlicensed-915-mhz-band-...
I've used it with some raspberry pis to create hi-fidelity walkie talkies it's quite pleasant.
It was TCP/IP data streaming down and commands going up.
Demi-automonous testing at some 2km range. Worked great...
XD
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.
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.