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DEFCON WiFi Shootout Winners Set A Land Record
bscience writes "While attending the DEFCON 12 convention this past weekend I had the chance to see the standing ovation a group of 19 year olds received for establishing a 55.1 mile unamplified WiFi connection!" A snippet from the Wired story linked there: "Mobile warriors having trouble making a wireless connection across the hall might want to give some Ohio teens a call. This weekend they were able to make a 55-mile Wi-Fi connection. ... They might have achieved an even greater distance, Justin Rigling said, "but there was no road left."" (Here's the post from a few weeks back about the competition.)
Because they didn't even max out the non-amplified distance. If you read the Slashdot blurb again it says They might have achieved an even greater distance, Justin Rigling said, "but there was no road left."
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Omnidirectional coverage is a bit harder to expand. You can't really beat a 5/8 wavelength groundplane, and they're easy to make. (at lower frequencies anyway, not sure about ghz)
Not counting the ability to use amplifiers, you could think of wifi coverage as light... put a 100w lightbulb in a field at night and how far away can you be and stil read a book? Not very far probably... 30 feet maybe. Now, take that bulb and put it in a parabolic lens. Now you've got a 100w flashlight. If the flashlight is pointed your way, you'll get hundreds of feet. The better the lens and the sharper the focus, the greater your range. Come up with a more fundamental improvement (like a 100w laser?) and your range increases to a radical distance that could easily be miles. But it still doesn't help the guy standing 5 feet off to the side of the light though, he's in the dark.
Directional and omnidirectional coverage are for totally different purposes, and really can't be compared or mixed. There's no use in complaining about your omni coverage when people are making improvements in directional coverage - it's apples and oranges.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Being a former Cinci resident, I was a bit curious about these guys, and google-stalked them . . .
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Looks like they all went to St. Xavier, a pretty well respected (in both athletics and academics) prep school.
Here's a picture of Ben when he was a junior, winning a theater award for sound production.
Meng's got a website here that's a bit outdated, but considering the projects were from his junior year in high school, rather impressive. Seems he was a HAM radio guy.
Running out of time, the first link I found for Justin Rigling was this link. One more connection to the guy, since I use to work for AK Steel. The little blurb about the scholarship does make him sound like a stereotypical geek (JETS, Science Olympiad, Robotics, Math, and Photography clubs, etc etc). A bit of a contrast to his sister. Not exactly what you'd expect from the son of a steelmaker . .
Okay, enough being a stalker . . .
As one of the judges, I can provide the GPS coordinates and you can use your favorite topo maps to determine if it is indeed possible. We will be putting up images and data on the contest page as well as www.adversarialsciencelab.net website sometime today.