[SOLVED] WiFi out to 800 feet

"By default, the maximum distance between transmitter and receiver is 1.6 km (1 mile). On longer distances the delay will force retransmissions."

That's without tweaking any parameters. 800 feet should not be a problem from a protocol perspective.

As I understand it, there are claims the retransmission thing doesn't kill the link instantly, but it does degrade performance.

And if you want some reading material, it's cheaper by the yard.

"Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E (802.11 n/ac/ax) (make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions)"

crafting an antenna strategy, you need a strong structure to mount it on, so that wind deflection is not an issue. That would be especially important with the super-high-gain antennas with the tiny-tiny-beamwidths. Having a signal strength indicator available, while doing the aiming, is especially helpful, even if a second person has to stand next to the router and read out numbers over a walkie-talkie to you.

There are companies that make good products for jobs like this, but you need a secret-decoder-ring to figure out which one to use. Their forum doesn't seem to have any company employees tasked with pre-sales work. It seems to be the usual user-to-user method.

Paul

To Paul's point, I recommend two companies, both out of San Jose, but both do mail order (one via distributors like Amazon).

More importantly, both give you specification sheets galore. o And both, IMHO, are reliable dependable outfits.

o For equipment, I'd stick with Ubiquiti on both ends, if I could:

o For ordering "stuff" (poles, bolts, etc.) I'd compare with Streakwave:

I'm sure other outfits are just as good, but you can't go wrong with them. o Prices are ok, quality is good, service is good, sales is experienced

BTW, with LOS & radios at each end, 800 feet is child's play for WiFi. o Curious how far your Wi-Fi access point is from your desktop computer

You must live in my neighborhood! :)

You bring up two important issues: a. Power at the remote site 800 feet away, and, b. The Fresnel zone of a pole only six feet tall

You can look up the Fresnel zone stuff separately, which, in my experience, is more theoretical than practical since you just shove more directional beam power to overcome the losses due to lack of height.

Power is an issue.

I'll ping "alt.internet.wireless" & "sci.electronics.repair" with this post, who may be able to assist you more so than I can in how to set up the power (be advised to ignore the three infants on s.e.r if they respond).

What we do here in the Santa Cruz mountains, where the zoning is 40 acres per household, is "bucket routers" which are simply routers plugged into anything we can plug them into, between homes when we need to clear obstructions to our Line of Sight (LOS) WiFi transceivers.

But your suggestion of solar seems far better than bucket routers.

On 10/4/20 7:59 PM, Arlen Holder wrote: [ nothing of any importance, as usual ]

Piss the f*ck off.

Oh, be nice. 300ft is about the limit for omnidirectional antennas on both ends of a 2.4GHz link. For 800ft, directional antennas with some gain are going to be required. To get some decent speeds, 5GHz instead of 2.4GHz.

Small antennas, long range, high speed... pick any two.

Drivel: For your amusement, a Model 15 TTY used as a terminal for a Linux computah. Handling upper/lower case was a kludge and handling arithmetic and programming symbols was impossible. No mention of termcap or terminfo:

"Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal"

Try it with your Model 15. That should keep you out of trouble for at least a little while.

I tried linking the shop to the house on 2.4 using 24" antennas at both ends. Distance was 1400 feet. Never could get it to work.

I bought a pair of Ubiquiti LiteBeam M5 with 23 dB antennas. Absolutely solid link.

I've seen that before. I don't have a Model 15. I have a Lorenz Lo-15c (made in Germany under license from the Teletype Corp.

Actually, I use it on i-Telex.

Hi Jeff,

We go way back, decades, regarding Fox's/Snit's childish rants on Usenet... o Nobody takes Snit/Fox seriously (just google for his name for reference).

Don't worry about Snit (Michael Glasser is who Fox's Mercantile really is). o He admitted it himself, years ago, when we caught him with the same IP

What I want to say is that I THANK YOU for helping the OP out. o I know there are adults on s.e.r who, like you, are knowledgeable.

The whole point of adding s.e.r and a.i.w was that the Windows group needed your expert assistance, which I, as an adult, for one, greatly appreciate.

Let's hope the OP reads your advice and takes it to heart for his problem o Adults like you can help him, and, in doing so, you help all of us.

It's what Usenet is supposed to be all about... o To that end, I include the OP's original post, verbatim, below:

o WiFi out to 800 feet

From: snipped-for-privacy@aol.com Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general Subject: WiFi out to 800 feet Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2020 23:28:01 -0400 Message-ID: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com

I didn't want to hijack the other thread but Arlen got my interest with those antennas.

If I wanted to hit a LAN based camera 800' away, what would I need to to do (clear LOS).

The objective would be to attach it to an existing security DVR that has 2 unused WiFi portals.

I am trying to avoid the cloud/phone thing but that seems to be what most of these ones I see are doing these days. I assume once they are on the network I could coax my DVR to see them.

Do I need an enhanced antenna at both ends or would the dish at the host end give me enough signal strength to talk?

Thanks

That would have been in the early '90s.

That's actually pretty funny, since it's right out in plain sight in the "From" field on all the postings I make.

But then this is the "due diligence" I've come to expect from Arlen. Zero and none.

On 10/4/20 7:59 PM, Arlen Holder wrote: [ nothing of value as usual ]

Let me know when you get tired of proving how useless you are.

What the hell? Clearly you don't do this for a living.

Generally speaking, yes. Practically speaking you can do several hundred mbps over a 2.4 link. You just need to widen the channel.

That is an absolutely correct assessment.

You can advise the OP better than I on potential Fresnel Zone issues, as he's apparently asking how best to paint a LOS location 800 feet away with the transceiver on a pole I believe.

You can run the math to explain to him how high that pole may need to be. (We do that stuff by trial and error - but you may know the math better.)

Please advise the OP on the math so he knows how high to mount the radio.

While there are 2.4GHz routers available that have a 40MHz channel bandwidth setting, I prefer not to use it because it reduces the available bandwidth to other users on 2.4GHz. If one is sufficiently clueless to use a 40 MHz channel set to CH6, it will effectively trash most of the 2.4GHz band. Since Wi-Fi pollution can be symmetrical, it also makes the receiver susceptible to more interference. Stay with 20MHz channel bandwidth on 2.4GHz.

On the other foot, the minimum channel bandwidth on 5GHz is 40MHz (depending on channel selected) with an option to use 80MHz or 160MHz for 802.11AC and AX (Wi-Fi 6).

With 1024-QAM, 802.11AX can theoretically do 1.2Gbits/sec in a 160MHz channel. Your mileage will certainly be less.

The test below was to demonstrate something else. However, it does show what can be done with 5GHz.

Unfortunately, the radios at both ends were only 802.11a, so the speed never went above 75 Mbits/sec at a distance of about 5 meters. It also uses Jperf 2.0.2, which doesn't work very well above 100 Mbit/sec. I should have used Iperf 3, which works well into the gigabit range: My home network is now mostly gigabit, so I could easily run some 5GHz performance tests with a later version of Iperf 3. However, no pretty graphs as nobody has bothered to port the Java code to work with Iperf3. I'm a horrible programmist, so I won't attempt it.

Anyway, the performance limiting factor is usually interference from co-channel users and noise sources. You could have all the bandwidth in the world, the most efficient modulation scheme, maximum legal RF power, and still not be able to communicate very well or far if there is an interference source nearby. In other words, one needs to do more than just "widen the channel".

By the way, I officially retired on Sept 30, 2020. The office is closed, the bank accounts emptied, and much of the equipment donated or sold.

Sigh. I've lost count how many times I've done that in this newsgroup. Start here:

800 ft is not far enough apart to worry about the curvature of the earth. 800ft / 5280ft/mile = 0.152 miles At 2.4Ghz, the Fresnel Zone is 9 ft radius at the midpoint of the link. Therefore, the antenna at both ends of the link need to be at least 9 ft off the ground, or 9 ft above any major obstructions (fences, trees, buildings, cars, etc). Actually, it's somewhat more complicated if I throw in fade margin, frequency selective fading, and system availability, but we won't need to go there for this example.

At 5 GHz, the Fresnel Zone radius is only 6.3 ft. Therefore, the antenna pole can be 2.7 feet shorter.

Methinks we've lost the OP long ago.

Well done sir.

Congratulations. You'll now enjoyably find everything you knew disappainting or being replaced by new kids on the block. I don't see any of those filling your shoes here and I usually only bother to lurk to see what you are posting.

I've run cantenna line-of-site over 400m reliably for years. I didn't measure the fresnel zone but a farmer's apple tree in his front must have encroached the signal line every few years and he would kindly lop a few branches, restoring normal service. I have a note of the speeds somewhere but the system gave me office access from home, home broadband via the office and all I remember is that the Wi-Fi speed was better than the rather poor broadband speed available at the end of a long exchange line.

After moving several years ago from the little hamlet (60 properties) the pathetic broadband (I think I had one of the best connections at

2mbps) was replaced by FTTP. I don't think I could have got mi Wi-Fi signal to keep up with the resulting 80Mbps broadband. Those we now Zoom with in that hamlet are always very clear and no blurring motion issues - I'm somewhat jealous. (UK in case any folk are struggling to understand any terminology or words).

Thanks. However, it's not easy to find enjoyment while trying to adjust to Covid-19, dysfunctional government at all levels, impending economic collapse, limits on travel, increasing weather related problems, an increasing homeless problem, and probably increased taxes to keep the economy afloat. Health problems and advancing age increasingly limit my activities. I can survive on Social Security payments and the 80% that Medicare provides, but suspect those benefits to will eventually be reduced by inflation as the government resorts to printing money to finance its activities. I expect my "retirement" to more closely resemble living on unemployment with the added bonus of having no debt and a modest bank account. Since I have no children or immediate family, I could easily have obtained a reverse mortgage on my house, and lived off the cash. However, the recent fires in California might make that impossible due to increasing difficulties obtaining replacement value fire insurance, a basic requirement for a reverse mortgage. In other words, the long term prospects for an enjoyable retirement look rather grim.

However, before I blunder on into this dismal future, I have an immediate problem to deal with. I brought about 75% of the contents of my formerly palatial office to my house when I moved out. There was no time to do sorting, only time to box everything and move. I moved it in small increments because I have no garage or storage space at the house and because I had to carry the boxes up about 50 stairs. The boxes are now piled up both inside and outside the house. Much of it is covered with ash that is still falling from the trees due to the recent nearby fires. Rain will likely arrive in a few weeks and nothing outside is protected. I need to deal with that immediately, but can't during the current heat waves. At least I won't be bored looking for something to do.

Incidentally, it's now 6AM and 75F (24C) outside. NWS predicts the temperature to rise to 101F (38C) today. I might be able to do 2-3 hrs of box shuffling today. It's likely that the local power company, PG&E, will intentionally disconnect the power to prevent falling power lines from starting more fires and to reduce the load on the power grid from air conditioning.

Thanks again for the hopeful thoughts, but this is not the retirement that I had planned and is unlikely to be enjoyable.

I see alchemy as your next hobby: Turning all that computer stuff into Gold! In which case you don't have to move any of. Rain won't hurt it.

I know it's hard to let go, but .....

-sw

So I was curious and youtubed it....This guy got $1,900 worth (about an ounce) of .99% gold from 6 pounds of clipped OLDER PCB connectors.

I suspect getting chemistry glass and HCL delivered to the Santa Cruz mountains may be difficult and raise some eyebrows. Or used to. It's kinda pointless to manufacture domestic meth anymore since it's so cheap from Mexico, so they may have deregulated that stuff.

Food for thought...

-sw