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

Re:What the?

[drinkypoo]

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.

One of my ex-housemates was a Sonar tech in the Navy. The Sonar and Radar guys apparently hang out together on those ships and one of their favorite games was to paint the guys coming up the desk with an armload of flourescent tubes with the radar, illuminating the lamps. Hilarity ensues. They never killed anyone doing it. But at close range and high power, I'm told you can throw hot dogs up into the path of the radar and they come down cooked.

Moral of the story is that it's directional and as long as you don't stand in front of it there's not likely to be any significant effect. At the other end, the signal has been scattered substantially and it's only coming in at a whisper of the original signal.

Re:What the?

[aktzin]

A friend of mine who's a military history buff told me a story about Soviet fighter aircraft in the 70s and 80s. Seems they had very powerful look-down, shoot-down radars and pilots were instructed to turn them off during take off and landing. Apparently sometimes they forgot, and runway maintenance crews had to regularly pick up the carcasses of rabbits, birds and other unlucky critters that were in the area when those MiGs went on missions.