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New WiFi Link Distance Record

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the wifi-vs-rfc-1149 dept.

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."

4 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. LOS by Moby+Cock · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    1. Re:LOS by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  2. Re:I've come close by Colin+Stanners · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. They used 1 meter dishes. Of course it works. by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.