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.)

Comments

No really.

[ItsIllak]

I don't get this. I've got a smallish house, but need two APs to cover it. I guess I'm considerably less directional, but still?!

Maybe these competitions could open up a second record of the largest diameter of coverage achieved. Maybe measured at four opposite points.

Re:No really.

[5m477m4n]

Some brands of APs have better range than others. I get pretty good range from Linksys. Also, APs generally get batter range than wireless routers. But sometimes it's nice having a smaller range, that way the guy down the street can't hack your connection or hijack your cable internet.

Re:No really.

[DaHat]

Might I suggest bring in a demo man to remove all of your walls and anything else that may, depending on your location in the house be anywhere near the line of sight of the signal that could conceivably interfere with it?

I have not RTFA, however if I remember last years competition right, the competing antennas were on the side of a large hill or mountain pointing down at a vehicle that was driving away. In such a case they have far fewer obstacles then you do in your home.

Re:No really.

[Trigun]

I have an Averatec laptop with built in Wi-fi and a D-link 514 Router on the 2nd floor of my house. I get 100% coverage inside my house, and can even go four or so houses in any direction. My SMC 802.11a/b card doesn't get me off my front porch.

Re:No really.

[ckd]

The gray base station has a Lucent PC card inside, so it's using a fairly lame antenna. You can put an external antenna on with a little Dremel work to make a hole in the base station case.

As for Airport Extreme, the Broadcom PC cards will work under OS X using the Apple driver; you'll wind up with a card sticking out of your TiBook, but you'll get 802.11g and probably better range as well. Worth a try.

The cheap thing to try (er, free :-) is to pop the battery out of the TiBook and make sure the antenna on that side is pressed firmly into the slot in the case. That may help your range a little bit.

Re:No really.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are, in fact, multiple APs that hand off seamlessly. See WDS, or the Apple Airport Extreme.

Re:No really.

[Creepy]

well, if you're going with Linksys, you may have to use 3rd party firmware to boost the signals (info on third party firmware for Linksys info here). The very common WRT-54G wireless router runs at 19mw and at that power, barely penetrates a hollow 2 foot wooden wall with no insulation (and drops the signal periodically), at least from my personal experience.

Installing Sveasoft, OpenWRT, or WiFi box firmware allows you to boost the signal to 84mw. I've read to avoid the full 84mw, as it can damage hardware in extended use, but I've also read that this is still in the legal range for the device... even wireless A indoor/outdoor is 250mW. (and I think g is up to 4W).

Re:A snippet

[agentforsythe]

"Then, when they established that record, they turned off their amplifiers and broke the record for an unamplified connection at the same distance."

does that mean that the connection wasn't actually established unamplified... merely maintained?

Transfer speed

[barcodez]

I would be interested to know what kind of transfer speed they got at that distance.

Help for rural areas?

[grunt107]

Althought the article does not mention it, it does not seem like the hardware used to accomplish this was all that advanced.

If that is the case, their technology could be implemented in limited population density areas, tying back to the somewhat larger urban areas.

Take for example Iowa. There are many areas over 30 miles from any town larger than 15-30k.
Surprisingly enough, these 'large' towns have cable/phone (DSL) access.

So now the remote areas can be wifi attached to the bigger towns/cities and get the faster access (although 11b is not screaming it is better than modem).

Re:Help for rural areas?

[jdmetz]

although 11b is not screaming it is better than modem

Assuming you could actually get 11mbps over that distance, that would be screaming compared to most cable or DSL access. The fastest DSL available in the city of 100k I live in is 6mbps downstream and 1.5mbps upstream.

Re:A snippet

[0x0d0a]

They didn't try to do so. My guess is that it's extremely difficult to align the dish with an extremely weak signal. The point of having the boosted signal was probably to help them initially align the dish. While it might be a real pain in the ass to set up such a connection without such assistance, once the dishes are aligned, apparently it's possible to run without amplification.

Re:Metrics is a Milestone away

[markov_chain]

I grew up in a metric society. I used to think metric units were superior until I lived in the US for a while, and found myself doing plenty of carpentry and DIY stuff where the most common units are inches and feet. I think the subdivision of a foot into 12 inches is fantastic; it allows one to easily divide dimensions into thirds, something that's a PITA in the metric world. In addition, the canonical subdivision of the inch into powers of 2 (1/2, 1/4, 1/8...) is convenient as well.

Regarding your point about doing without metric, note that virtually all building materials come in imperial sizes. There is no need to know metric units in that environment.

200mW Engenius cards

[Anonymous Coward]

They must have been using this card
http://keenansystems.com/store/engenius_senao_200m w_pcmcia_card_with_mmcx_connectors_2511-cd-plus-ex t2.htm

Re:Congrats to these kids

[Render_Man]

I was in the second row, middle block 3rd seat in from speakers left. I probobly have a picture of the back of your head there vbrookslv.

I was blown away by these guys too. It was most impressive because they had the stuff lying around, made a decision to enter and did it. Despite parents objections they made the trip and got a standing ovation and a heap of well earned praise.

They did'nt brute force it by just adding more power (they said they were only at about 600mw), they just sat down and did the math to build the dish right. Far more design thought than several people I still see claiming pringles cans are the greatest.

I just love the fact they also build some targeting equipment and were using linear actuators to align the dishes. Just brilliant. I wish them the best, and a safe drive home.

Re:A snippet

[ASLRulz]

The connection was (re)established unamplified. The team had to shutdown the connection, tilt the antenna down, and climb a latter to remove the amp. Then of course, re-aim the antenna and try again.