Long Range Wi-Fi – Pushing 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi to the limits (2019)

Ubiquiti do 5.8GHz bridges that work well over long distances.

I used a pair to link from my house to a nearby block of flats, around 9km LOS, and back to my friend's house (we didn't have LOS to each other) around 15km.

They worked well at full link speed, around 80Mbps. These were just bog standard off-the-shelf ones, although for space considerations I "mix'n'matched" the links using one with a 10dB dish at one end and the patch antenna at the other.

Here in the UK at least, you can use as high an EIRP as you like, so there's nothing to stop you taking a cheapy USB wifi or bluetooth dongle and 3D printing an adaptor to mount it on the boom of a cheap satellite dish.

I've been running a 1.1km 5Ghz 802.11ac wifi link between two highly directional antennas for three years now. They have line-of-sight, albeit just barely. The kit I got cost $100 at the time. It was quite easy to setup even and supposedly can go much further than I'm using them for.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083JRFQ24

Well, ham radio is an EXTREMELY diverse field. I mean, some people are using kilowatts and arrays of yagi antenna to transmit earth-moon-earth. Others are using minimal power (e.g. less than a typical bicycle lamp) to reach someone at the other side of the earth. Some are designing nice sound compression algorithms or algorithms for software designed radio in FPGAs on their self-designed board. Other try to build a full transceiver with less than 40 components total. Some are seeking contacts "rare" countries like other seek rare post stamps.

And most of this isn't really done to communicate. For that, most ham amateurs would use cell-phones, Facebook or whatnot. It's done for the sake of doing it. Or, in other words, to have an excuse to tinker with technical things.

That you can actually communicate is often just a consequence, a by-product. And the "communication" e.g. in contests to seek rare countries is actually really, really bland and boring. Translated to english: "Here is Mike, Calling Reunion, calling Reunion, calling Reunion, Mike here" - "Here is Jaques, Renunion, answering to Mike. I can your you very bad" - "Mike here, to Jaque. I can your you quite nice. And thanks for the talks ... calling Mongolia, calling Mongolia, here is Mike, calling Mongolia ..." --- and it's on PSK31 or CW even shorter.

You see, the ACTUAL communication is boring. The kick is probably to be able to manage and adjust your transceiver, wires, antenna, technical skills to actually be able to connect to these countries.

Or to be able to program and use in-real-life a sound compression algorithm with machine-learning and to test that with alike people on e.g. HF, Meteoscatter, via Satellite (which all produce very different channel characteristics).

Or to produce your own 6-layer PCP with an FPGA that actually does nice SDR algorithms.

It's a means to self-gratification.

There are several legal digital formats (e.g. PSK31, FT8, RTTY) that, while not encrypted, will render 'reading the mail' hard for anyone not aware of those formats and/or the right equipment and where to get it.

Most hams can enjoy the hobby without encryption. The limits discourage uses that endanger the hobby.

I always find the anti-encryption arguments frustrating because all the digital modes are going to have data whitening anyway, and are therefore (if you are not aware of the exact protocol) indistinguishable from encrypted transmissions for all practical purposes. We already have a number of common systems that are basically encrypted because the codecs are proprietary.

The actual mechanism preventing abuse is the requirement to broadcast a callsign in a way that casual observers can interpret it.

The purpose of the ham license is to experiment with radio technology itself. If encryption was allowed, all channels would be occupied at all times by encrypted data coming from people with more powerful transmitters than you, and then how would you make any test transmissions?

Thats the arguably legal part. Using a VPN or SSL over it violates the law, so...

I don't see the point personally. I'm just aware of the arguments. The "best" use case I saw was some hunting and lake cabins extending coverage.

> Things like no encrypted communications really limits the utility.

How so?

> This are however just records. E.g. "I still have a connection".

This chatter about a successful 2005 Defcon shootout [0] indicates that a 125 mile link was able to pass traffic sufficiently reliably to be used for SSH, VNC, and other applications summarized as "etc" for several hours.

The one that somat appears to be thinking about was the year before and set up a ~55 mile link. The Wired article about it [1] doesn't say much about what data was shoved over the link, just that they "...shot a signal from one station to the second station with an encrypted message provided by the judges.", suggesting that at least some data transfer was required to consider the attempt valid.

> Just mounting a maneuvering 3 m dish to your laptop isn't everyones most desired leisure ...

That would have to be a very fancy dish to handle targeting a spot 1.5Km+ away while attached to a device that's being manhandled. I imagine it'd make much more sense to put the dish on a fixed mount and wire it up to the laptop, run wired ethernet from the AP to the laptop, or have a second radio in an AP to provide service to nearby clients.

[0] <https://groups.google.com/g/SOCALWUG/c/5T5wekafdv8>

[1] <https://defcon.org/html/links/dc_press/archives/12/wired_wif...>

Yeah. I ran a hand crimped cat-5 Ethernet run to my office and speed tested it, and it turns out my wifi is faster, according to speed.cloudflare.com. Haven't had a chance to debug that yet, but there's a switch and some other wiring in the way.

And both have the 4 antenna 2 way MIMO, which not all chips / laptops support yet. And not even all routers.

It's surprisingly complex actually.