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.

[v1]

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.

Re:No really.

[Mr Guy]

All this is true and valid, but it still doesn't fix the problem that it's only marginally usefull, while people would pay big money for a good way to repeat passed walls more cheaply than sticking another AP wired to the LAN on the other side of it.

Re:No really.

[Lumpy]

Nahh, it's easy to significantly increse the coverage in a home without much work. In many of the high-brow homes I help a friend of mine install home automation and whole house multimedia I do the networking on the side. One AP can easily cover most fo a 2000Sq foot home. but you need to place the AP in regards to where it will be used most.

rule 1 - make it central to the house. If you use it mostly in your den at the south end of the house then the AP will be in the celing, about 6 feet from the office in the hallway. if your home is larger, buying a pair of low end aftermarket antennas and spreading out the antennas makes a bigger difference. In one home i had the AP in the kitchen, 1 antenna 6 feet from that location and th eother 3 feet in the opposite direction. Adding a 1 foot square piece of sheet metal about 1 wavelength away from the antenna in the direction of the outside wall will also help in two ways. 1 to limit the external radiation to the neighbors. (the best wireless security is to be sure they cant get a signal) and 2 to reflect the signal back to the working area.

I have covered houses of 4000 sq feet with 1 AP and 2 comp-usa grade add-on antennas. no you will not get 100% in all areas of the home, but you will not drop below 40% and some places like the bottom of the closet in the basement guest bedroom do not need woreless coverage.

being realistic about wireless coverage is the first step. the second step is to use the 802.11 repeaters when you only absolutely have to.

but in a home for rich people... multiple AP'
s are not a viable option as it doesn't hand off seamlessly.

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: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?

Re:A snippet

[Alsee]

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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Customers freaking out...

[mikael]

Well, if someone parked outside my building, pointed a six foot dish at my office, and told me my wireless data needed encrypting, I'd probably freak out too.

Hawking their equipment?

[djcapelis]

Am I the only one who find it amusing that these guys roll in on a whim, break the record, win some stuff and immediately go hawk their equipment?

Some good old hacking spirit right there...

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).

Congrats to these kids

[vbrookslv]

I was there in the front row at the awards ceremony at DC12. These kids remind me of myself just a few years ago when I just picked up and moved to Vegas. Wasn't even sure if I had enough money for gas (good thing I was driving a Festiva @~45mpg). I guess this is a good case for those who say that all kids today are slackers.

For those who do not know, this contest was held in (and around) Vegas, when it was 110+ outside. These guys were dragging equipment up the side of a mountain to get this link. For those who would give these kids sh**, try dragging a 10ft dish(3.048 meters for you metric weenies) several hundred feet up a mountain, and then getting them aligned 55 miles apart, all in 110+f(43c) weather. There was no big 4x4's, they drove dads busted-a** minivan from Ohio for this. Sure, NASA could probably do better, but come'on, this was an amateur thing, and just something cool to do. No big prizes (they won like a couple-hundred bucks in Best Buy gift certs, and some gear).

If I had a had on, it would be off to these kids for some ingenuity and determination.

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.

Partial sponsor

[Lawbeefaroni]

From the article:
Wired magazine helped sponsor the contest.

What's the word? Irony? Misnomer?

Interesting Guys

[HoldenCaulfield]

Being a former Cinci resident, I was a bit curious about these guys, and google-stalked them . . .

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 . . .

Re:It's a fraud...

[ASLRulz]

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.