43 km line of sight with USB WiFi stick (2005)

As always with radio, it&#x27;s mostly about unobstructed line of sight and the gain in your antenna system.<p>We&#x27;re still in communication with Voyager 1, which is operating on a grand total of about 20W of RF power; and is currently about 14.5 billion miles away.

An easier to find link that shows how to make the home-brewed antenna for those interested in trying it out for themselves<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flylib.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;en&#x2F;2.434.1&#x2F;hack_83_make_a_deep_dish_cylindrical_parabolic_reflector.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flylib.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;en&#x2F;2.434.1&#x2F;hack_83_make_a_deep_dish...</a>

I want this to be part of a Hollywood movie. The protagonist is using his makeshift wifi setup to hack into a bank computer systems 43Km away from his location, and the bank people has no idea what is going on.

He got the Wifi network to show up, but did he get a connection?<p>A bit higher quality point-to-point can be obtained with a bit of specialized equipment, Mikrotik has a bunch: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikrotik.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;MTAD-5G-30D3-PA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikrotik.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;MTAD-5G-30D3-PA</a> for example, can go 40+ km.

You can hit the space stations repeater with a $40 boafeng radio. Line of site baby!

But did they establish a link and transfer data?<p>Broadcast packets with the SSID aren&#x27;t too difficult to get. You only need to get one.<p>Fun regardless, but I&#x27;m curious for more info.

I wonder how modern (2022) equipment might fare?<p>Certainly the author picked a beautiful region to do that kind of outdoor experiment in.

Approximate locations of the setup &amp; measurement on the OpenStreetMap:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;directions?engine=fossgis_osrm_car&amp;route=44.983%2C14.145%3B45.327%2C14.441#map=11&#x2F;45.1731&#x2F;14.1930&amp;layers=Y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;directions?engine=fossgis_osrm...</a>

This is an old article, dating back to at least 2005 as per Web Archive[0] please edit the title to reflect that.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20050201000000*&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qsl.net&#x2F;9a4qv&#x2F;WiFi_Ri.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20050201000000*&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qsl....</a>

Overall I&#x27;ve had very good luck with the RF performance of external WiFi sticks. All too often the antennas inside laptops and phones are really an afterthought so the WiFi and (particularly) Bluetooth performance is awful.

I wonder if optical communications (with lasers or similar technology) would be a better choice in this situation, given that there is line of sight. With WiFi you are mostly limited by the legal requirements regarding transmit power.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Free-space_optical_communication" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Free-space_optical_communicati...</a>.

The WIFI beacon he received is likely using the 1Mbps DSSS 802.11b PHY, which has 11dB of processing gain which also helps quite a bit here.

This reminds me of another old story I have bookmarked, but it&#x27;s for a wireless keyboard:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20061205205844&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aftenposten.no&#x2F;english&#x2F;local&#x2F;article427668.ece" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20061205205844&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aftenp...</a>

Huh, did not know that Adam 9A4QV had also that site in addition to the Microwave Croatia blog and the LNA4ALL product blog. Dude has done all kinds of cool stuff.

To someone that understands this, I&#x27;m curious: is line of sight, especially this far, impacted by something like a bird flying in the middle?

actually, LoS over open water, is following physical laws. GSM (with a range limitation of 35km by timing) was very well recievable from ships.

My guess is that they had an inversion layer, tropospheric duct, or other enhancement condition. 43km is a long way on 0.02 watts.

And why not? When I lived in Utah, I could easily hit a mountain-top ham radio repeater 20+ miles away with my little 5W handheld radio. A small weather balloon with a sub-1W transmitter can easily be heard at 100K feet altitude by people hundreds of miles away. So long as you have LoS, it&#x27;s not problem.

Without the bit rate there&#x27;s not enough information to know if it&#x27;s impressive or not. Define a low enough bit rate as a usable radio link and it can be 10 times that length with a 10th of the power level (Shannon-Hartley).<p>Perhaps given the limitations of 802.11 it means something but in theory it&#x27;s meh.

Fun game: using only the map, try to guess the country

The software in use for LOS test looks like Radio Mobile which is a great piece of free software for radio work

I wonder if you could boost output even farther using a colinear antenna in the reflector dish.

Now LoRa seems like a better choice

And mine keeps cutting out if someone fat walks between my laptop and the router 6 feet away...

I loved looking at that laptop - a translucent chassis, crazy!

What about the curvature of the earth?

Ukranians interested in this now.

Very impressive! Please correct the error in the title -- it&#x27;s &quot;line of sight,&quot; not &quot;line of site.&quot;