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."

Comments

LOS

[Moby Cock]

The Line of Sight caveat is a rather significant point ommitted from the summary. This is still quite an achievement.

Re:LOS

[Red Flayer]

I don't understand, what caveat are you talking about?

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 able to do this without LOS... and then didn't click a link to RTFA... well... any misunderstanding they have is their own fault.

Re:LOS

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think the fact that a mountain was involved should be an indicator.

Re:LOS

[mollymoo]

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:

• Miss World was wearing her makeup.
• The lap record at Indy wasn't set in the rain.
• Asafa Powell didn't have a broken leg when he set the 100m world record.
• The quoted 0-60 time of your car wasn't set with a family of 4, their dog and luggage for a months holiday on board.
• The largest number of people ever to fit into a Mini were not all sumo wrestlers.

I guess you can't trust anybody these days, eh?

What the?

[Dr. Smoove]

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.

Re:I've come close

[Colin Stanners]

Well, some so-called "top shelf" stuff sucks too (think of Linksys, who uses crappy Broadcom radios in most of their equipment).

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.

They used 1 meter dishes. Of course it works.

[Animats]

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.

OT: your sig

[TeknoHog]

*BSD is for People who Love *nix; Linux is for People who Hate Windows

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.

Re:Amazing

[Lockejaw]

How is this possible?

Directional antennas?