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kawfey 25 minutes ago [-]
"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.
Not one Pringles can utilized. We have failed to pass along the ancient knowledge.
walrus01 43 minutes ago [-]
Not a Senao 802.11a pcmcia card in sight
somat 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Yeah, I met Radio when he was at MIT. He got a black badge from Defcon for it.
CobaltFire 2 hours ago [-]
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.
firesteelrain 1 hours ago [-]
You can buy consumer wireless repeaters basically but the latency sucks
firesteelrain 2 hours ago [-]
I am still reminded of early WiFi and ways to extend it with Cantenna or foil backed contraptions made out of cardboard.
CobaltFire 2 hours ago [-]
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.
NDlurker 1 hours ago [-]
And no passwords! That's how I got Internet as a broke college student living off campus.
canpan 1 hours ago [-]
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.
pwarner 53 minutes ago [-]
Latency seems higher, much higher sometimes, and variable.
I need to complete the LAN cable runs I started long ago :-)
mgillett54 60 minutes ago [-]
Depends on the WiFi, you can easily get 1Gbps on WiFi 7 as long as your modem + access point have the bandwidth
fragmede 17 minutes ago [-]
Yeah. I ran a hand crimped cat-5 Ethernet run to my office and speed tested it, and it turns out my wifi is faster, according to speed.cloudflare.com. Haven't had a chance to debug that yet, but there's a switch and some other wiring in the way.
bombcar 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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...
I will probably never be able to find the source, and my poor memory probably inflated the range like any good fish story.
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.
Extreme contention when 250 people had 3 APs as their only connection and half were trying to play WoW at the same time.