New WiFi Link Distance Record 124
Espectr0 writes "A Venezuelan professor along with his team have set a new record for the longest WiFi link. Using commodity hardware, they established a connection between a PC in El Águila, Venezuela, and one in Platillón Mountain, a distance of about 237 miles. The previous record was 193 miles. Slides [PDF] are also available."
I've come close (Score:5, Funny)
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If you use good radios (Atheros, esp. the Ubiquity 400mw cards - wow), good antennas (these guys' dishes are 27dbi? Standard routers and cards are *2*dbi) and have great/incredible LOS, the distance you can go is essentially limited only by earth curvature.
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Re:I've come close (Score:5, Funny)
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You live in an 8 floor* house?
* Assuming 3 meters per floor. Also including basement.
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LOS (Score:5, Insightful)
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That this connection did have LOS? That LOS (and radio interference, etc) is obviously a problem in more populated areas, and I should expect to make this work in New Jersey?
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who doesn't RTFA, AND somehow lacks the basic understanding of wireless communications to figure out that they must have had LOS, doesn't deserve the extra effort it takes to put in a caveat like that.
Seriously... if someone thought that they were
Re:LOS (Score:5, Insightful)
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Its rather far.
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You mean they didn't have anything in the way of the signal? Damn, I was thinking when they mentioned a mountain they were going through it, not using the top of it. Not only that but the damn cheats didn't even wait till it rained!
I've done some digging and apparently this kind of flagrant dishonesty is pretty widespread. Here are some more significant points omitted from stories elsewhere in the media:
Walls and Air (Score:1)
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What the? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What the? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my ex-housemates was a Sonar tech in the Navy. The Sonar and Radar guys apparently hang out together on those ships and one of their favorite games was to paint the guys coming up the desk with an armload of flourescent tubes with the radar, illuminating the lamps. Hilarity ensues. They never killed anyone doing it. But at close range and high power, I'm told you can throw hot dogs up into the path of the radar and they come down cooked.
Moral of the story is that it's directional and as long as you don't stand in front of it there's not likely to be any significant effect. At the other end, the signal has been scattered substantially and it's only coming in at a whisper of the original signal.
Hot dogs in the military (Score:2)
of microwave radar if possible to warm up.
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Re:What the? (Score:5, Funny)
Hot dogs are already cooked when you buy them
OT: your sig (Score:3, Insightful)
I just wanted to point out that I use Linux because I like Linux. I wonder if it's possible for people in general to prefer X solely for the properties of X, instead of how it is related to Y.
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I just wanted to point out that I use Linux because I like Linux. I wonder if it's possible for people in general to prefer X solely for the properties of X, instead of how it is related to Y.
(I said "BSD distro"...stand back and duck for cover)
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Way off topic: Operating systems (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Roast Seagull... (Score:3, Interesting)
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I also doubt the story is true, but maybe not for that reason. Who the hell hires a transmission tower night watchman?
Another Navy radar story... (Score:2)
Proverb (Score:2)
Re:What the? (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's what we engineers would call "complete cobblers". The pow
75 foot antenna? (Score:2)
And good luck keeping it from bending.
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and a parabolic, and various amplifiers... and this:
They never said how they accomplished that, but it was presumably done by hacking the firmware to change the collision detection and the back-off settings.
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Based on that, I'd say the answer to your question is "none whatsoever".
Fry things? Uhm No. (Score:2)
(the presentation also mentions 100mW on one of the "background" slides).
Based on that, I'd say the answer to your question is "none whatsoever".
Exactly.
What people are not understanding is that there is a BIG difference between peak envelope power (PEP) and effective radiated power (ERP). Bigger antennas and stacked arrays allow you get uber amounts of gain in signal. Instead of cranking the power output up, you focus it instead. Basically it's like adding more lenses and mirrors to an optical system to get an ever increasing focused beam of light from an incoherent light source (i.e. light bulb).
So, instead of spraying 100mW in an essen
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A microwave oven puts 900 to 1100W at about 1 foot of the food, and you need several seconds to warm something up. So, unless a stupid bird happens to sit right at the antenna beam for a few hours, I don't think it will affect living things more than some 10kW
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I wasn't able to find any information on how much power they were using, but with a few caveats, the answer to "what impact does the outputting a signal that strong have on living things?" is "about the same or less impact than using the same power with a less efficient antenna."
It's certainly true that by standing d
Nice work but... (Score:5, Funny)
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I knew there was a use for that damned police helicopter!
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These guys are in BIG trouble with the FCC! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:These guys are in BIG trouble with the FCC! (Score:5, Funny)
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C'mon... They're geeks working on the longest WiFi link... Having sex isn't even in the realm of possibility!
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dont check your email! [arstechnica.com]
No Chavez? (Score:1, Funny)
I'm shocked!
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I'm shocked!
Heh, i was actually going to put something like "See? We aren't all About Chavez down here!" but got chicken and decided to be mature.
whoop dee freakin doo (Score:1, Flamebait)
Can we now please stop trying to set ridiculous "records" concerning WIFI connections?
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No.
We thank you for your interest.
Now where's the tech info? (Score:2)
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In unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)
Cuban government officials have begun a new, lucrative service where they have established a WiFi base and are charging $10/day to residents of southern Florida for unfettered Internet access. "We have very good download rates for Sicko and, of course, for all your favorite music artists," Castro's spokesperson is quoted as saying. In the background this reporter could hear maniacal laughter and intermittent shouts of "See what the RIAA thinks of that!" and other such obscenities.
They used 1 meter dishes. Of course it works. (Score:5, Insightful)
The technology is straightforward. They had line of sight, used 1 meter dishes at each end, and aligned them with telescopes. Point to point microwave links have been doing that since the 1950s. After all, you can get a signal to and from geosync orbit with a dish of that size.
The most interesting thing about this is that they found two points on the earth's surface 273 miles apart with a clear line of sight between them.
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Shortest record ever... (Score:1)
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No signal amplifiers? (Score:1)
Since it's Venezuela I bet they don't have any regulations on transmission power either.
I have setup systems using the same hardware they are using for an old neighbor of mine who wanted to link his horse barn to his home network so he could install security cameras. I set him up with a s
For the rest of the world (Score:1)
193 miles = 310.603392 kilometers
Not such a big deal. (Score:1)
295 km in Italy (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Further the science or just a dumb stunt? (Score:4, Informative)
Not practical for most remote regions (Score:2)
(Why would environmentalists object to saving 250 miles of wilderness from having cables and an access road plowed t
The link goes to Wired Magazine (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Further the science or just a dumb stunt? (Score:5, Informative)
Neither, if you read the PDF [eslared.org.ve] about the experiment, you'll see the aim is to discover whether stock equipment can be used to connect remote areas to the Internet. Connecting people in rural locations is a challenge being faced in many countries, others have different solutions [bbc.co.uk].
Really, I consider myself a bit of a leftie and I'd like to see Mugabe slung out of power as much as any Tory would. Comparing Mugabe to the liberal left is like comparing Karl Marx with Ronald McDonald: pointless and stupid.
Re:Further the science or just a dumb stunt? (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, wait, I think I know this one: one published in Hamburg and the other punished the Hamburgler? Was that it?
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Mugabe and all the other third world despots were the *darlings* of the left back when they were leading "people's revolutions" against the big bad colonial governments.
Now that Muegabe et al have settled into plain-old authoritarian behavior, the left wants to pretend that they don't exist and continue blaming Western governments and policies for the "failure" of Africa and other third world regions.
Re:I'd like to know... (Score:5, Informative)
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The Linksys (WRT54G) equipment that had 65kbps sustained in both directions had 1% packet loss over 58 packets (one lost packet).
In all, they both were sustained and stable connections, but the TIER hardware was a far better connection in terms of speed than the Linksys hardware.
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More importantly... (Score:2)
Re:I'd like to know... (Score:4, Funny)
(as /me ducks and runzlakhell...)
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Re:Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
1) Keep my bluetooth headset connected to its base station an amazingly 3 feet away
2) Keep my cellphone connected with a tower a mere 1 mile away.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Funny)
1) Keep my bluetooth headset connected to its base station an amazingly 3 feet away
2) Keep my cellphone connected with a tower a mere 1 mile away.
5) Profit!
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Yes, from Wikipedia (Humpty Dumpty) [wikipedia.org]
In an attempt to make my sarcastic comment now informative. Here is an article about why Humpty Dumpty was portrayed as an egg, even though it was never directly stated.
Why is Humpty Dumpty portrayed as an egg [straightdope.com]
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