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New WiFi Link Distance Record
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."
Good news for the WarDrivers!
mod me funny
I almost get a usable signal in my bedroom which is 237 decimeters away from my access point in my basement. Oh... the article claims 237 miles. My "of the shelf" equipment must have come from the clearance shelf.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The Line of Sight caveat is a rather significant point ommitted from the summary. This is still quite an achievement.
This is amazing, yet the scientist and all the kings men STILL cannot:
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.
How is this possible?
I can't even get a good enough signal to steal wireless Internet from my neighbor.
Yea, one of those 75 foot off the shelf antennas. I am also wondering, what kind of impact does outputting a signal that strong have on living things? I don't know much about that sort of thing.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
Good for them. But since WiFi is line of sight, the only way they can do this is by using mountainous regions. I guess us flatlanders will have to resort to bouncing our signals off of blimps or flying pigs (coated in foil, of course).
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
...what the datarate was.
Miren al Pepino! Los vegetales invidian a su amigo, como él quieren bailar. Pepino Bailarín!
Does this do something to actually improve RF systems (eg, testing new antennas, filters, etc etc), or is it merely a dumb stunt of only interest to guys who have a lot of empty Pringles cans around?
I'm guessing the latter, since other RF technologies and systems exist for reliably bridging these kinds of distances, although I suspect the left wing of Slashdot might chime in about its applicability for solving all the problems of Mugabe's Zimbabwe, etc.
The article is from Wired. I'll let you figure it out from there.
Just wait until the FCC hears about this! These guys are in big, big trouble.
A Venezuelan article in /. that is NOT related to Chavez at all and it's actually science and technology?
I'm shocked!
OK, we get it. You can transmit WIFI as far as you have line of sight. If you have 2 mountains that can see each other 500 miles apart you can probably send WIFI communications between them.
Can we now please stop trying to set ridiculous "records" concerning WIFI connections?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I'm working with a group of people to setup an emergency wifi network grid around the county. It has hit a barrier due to technical issues mostly dealing with distance. So this can be very useful as long as they give real info rather than a "we just used a WRT54GS and a directional antennae and pumped up the wattage"
In cold climes, it's been a convention to stand in front
of microwave radar if possible to warm up.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
In other news...
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.
So how many kilometers is that?
That's a lot of Pringles cans and many rolls of duct tape.
And good luck keeping it from bending.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
it's realy not that nteresting. they didn't use pringe cans...
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.
...what's the packet loss percentage? ;-)
Now there is a record that will last til the beginning of August. (Think Vegas)
Links to blogs with a picture and a paragraph suck. What is even worse is this blog points to a cnet blog for more informtion which basically states the same thing as the /. posted article text and the original linked blog, then that blog links to a third location that adds one or to more sentences but for the most part, states the same as the other two blogs.
I'll sum up the details after going through all of that. Someone established a "link" of 237 miles, I can see a large antennea in the picture and a dude standing in poison ivy doing something on a laptop. You are not going to find any more technical information then that in any of the links. Oh, and all three links state that radio interference causes distance problems, wireless technology is getting better through research, and 237 miles is a long distance.
I'm suprised they are sticking to the 100mW provided by the Linksys unit. There are a LOT of signal amplifiers for 802.11 and I bet pumping that signal up to 1W would allow them something closer to the 11mb with less noise.
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 since "Cantenna" set and some Axis Internet based security cameras.
This summer I get to help a neighbor of my father's leach DSL off my father since he's outside of DSL range. Roughly a 3/4 mile run across open water. Two DSL dish based Cantenna setups waiting for my father and his neighbor to put up the poles I will mount the dishes to. I'm hoping to push the full 54Mbps, but will likely only get 11mbps. But then anything better than the 22.4kbps dilaup he's currently getting is probably fine with him.
A colleague of mine was a submariner who had this story. They were down for an extended dive, and when they surfaced, they would send a short, dense burst of communications and data on a very powerful microwave uplink - get up, send fast, get back down. It was a very powerful signal - and they would surface to a depth that would get the periscope and the antenna above water, do a quick scan for surface vessels, send the burst and dive. One day they did this and saw thru the periscope there was a gull on the antenna mast. So they would dive to submerge the antenna, the bird should fly away. They resurfaced, and the bird perched on the antenna. They did it again. Bird comes back. Third time. Fourth. Can't shake the bird. Finally the OD tells them "punch it" and send the microwave burst signal. He said the bird just keeled over and dropped into the water.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Or does that picture look like a deleted scene from ET, when he puts together his signaling device? And on a side note, it took me an hour to get 2 pcs connected to my new G express router when they were 15 feet away, how long must this have taken?
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.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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 essentially omnidirectional pattern like the little rubber antennas on the back of your wireless router do, they focused it as much as possible towards the other end of the link. The optical analogy here is a lighthouse with its huge fresnel lens. A moddest light behind such a lens looks quite bright from several miles away as result.
Then, with essentially nothing in the way, the only loses left to contend with are atmospheric absorbtion and scattering. Get up into that higher altitude air that has less water vapor and dust and you've got even less atmospheric loss working in your favor.
I think operating systems are evolving too fast. I mean, I would have killed to have Windows XP in the 90s. Mac OS X is a completely different beast than earlier Mac OS versions. Once we get down to plain old preference things might change, but for now I need there are actual quality differences going on. As in, X solves this vastly superior to Y for almost everyone. For example, x.org are doing some major changes to support input/output hotplugging etc. in the next release which I look forward to. To me it's what Windows vs Mac vs Linux vs *BSD offer NOW, and that might change within a few years. For example, right now I'm underwhelmed with Vista but if DX10 is a big hit for games I might change my mind. Macs always have new tricks up their sleeve, KDE4 is looking good but not due for several months as 4.0.0 and probably not very solid until over Christmas. So no, I won't make any promises to stick with X because in a year or two it can have been surpassed by Y and Z. To me, operating systems aren't a religion.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But can you play a udp multiplayer game over it? I already know the answer is no. WiFi is of very limited use.
In fall of this year the CSBF will be launching the Sunrise payload from Fort Sumner NM. On board will be the E-Link system from Esrange, Sweden. 10 Mbit to line of sight @ 125000 Ft. Approx 350 miles. (They use a 6 ft dish at the ground station and 10 watts at both ends) Frequency approvals through the US gov are already approved.
s /space_instrumentation_2006/barthol_Sunrise.pdf
So there...
HA!
Link:
http://www.mps.mpg.de/solar-system-school/lecture
A buddy of mine said that they used to fire up the radar in port sometimes and it would cook seagulls right out of the air.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
193 miles = 310.603392 kilometers
about me A - B
There is a proverb, "Roasted birds do not drop down from the sky". I assume its author never served at a radar.
Take the American West or Alaska, for example. That whole "Hmm, you need to have a direct line of sight between point A and point B" is a bit of a bummer once you think of trees, hills, buildings, etc, which could possibly get in the way of the signal. Putting point B on top of a mountain makes it marginally easier, but of course if we tried that here environmentalists would probably object.
(Why would environmentalists object to saving 250 miles of wilderness from having cables and an access road plowed through them? I don't know, but if they can simultaneously say that global warming is going to be the end of the world as we know it unless Peak Oil gets us first but for Gaea's sake DON'T USE NUKES, they can probably manage it.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I really don't see what all the fuss is about. It's nothing compared to my router. My signal goes around the world twice before reaching my laptop.
let me also share this record (announced also 24 may in in this Italian newspaper): the Ixem team of "Politecnico" in Torino has set up a 20megabit connection from "Capanna Margherita" (Mount Blanc, 4556m of altitude) with "Pian Cavallaro" (a point on the mountain range that divides Tuscany from Emilia-Romagna); the two points were 295km apart; the hw used was a 386 CPU running Linux; the network is Hiperlan type 2 and Wi-Max 802.16 (EIRP regulatory requirements limited to 30 dBm is satisfied). They have also set a webcam in Capanna Margherita, that is accessed thru the link
So I guess they used magic, not a wireless connection, to control the mars rover? Seems like that's be the longest. I think the voyager probes and others used analog, not digital transmissions so they don't count I guess. Pretty sure the rovers used digital though.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I can see it now: Free internet for all thanks to Wi-Fi installations at every Citgo. Cruise the net while tanking up!
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.