![\"\"](\"..\/..\/attention\/mountain_2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I live on a mountain.<\/p>\n
I get my high speed Internet<\/a> by using a microwave link from a tower on the hill near the house to the top of a tall building in San Jose, a distance of about 11 miles.<\/p>\n Since that link provides me with much more bandwidth than I actually use, even when streaming video from my henhouse, I give free Internet access to those of my neighbors who don’t have line-of-sight to San Jose. Some of the links are what we call “wires through the woods”, but several are WiFi links, using directional antennas<\/a> and Linksys WRT54G wireless routers.<\/p>\n Our longest link is 2.89 miles, to a house across a canyon from me, on another ridge to the east. But just for fun, I set up a dish aiming at distant Fremont, and put another dish on the lumber rack of my pickup truck and drove to a hill above that city<\/a> and parked on the side of the road, aimed my dish towards home, and got a solid signal at a distance of a little over 26 miles as the crow flies. I was getting a nominal 5.5 megabits per second at that distance, which allowed me to get actual measured throughput of just under 3 megabits per second. Surfing the web was still plenty fast enough, and what delay I was seeing was the normal server delay. I could not really tell any difference, subjectively, from surfing at home.<\/p>\n I would have gone farther, but I had run out of road.<\/p>\n Back home, I drove to the top of the mountain, and aimed my dish around at various parts of Silicon Valley and beyond, and used the NetStumbler<\/a> program<\/a> to find access points<\/a>. At one point, I was able to get a signal from a transmitter in Oakland, about 45 miles away.<\/p>\n I was feeling pretty proud of myself, with my truck mounted 24 dBi microwave dish<\/a> and my 300 milliwatt WiFi card in the laptop computer.<\/p>\n Then I read about some guys who went just under 125 miles<\/a> using 300 milliwatt cards<\/a> in their laptops, feeding 10 and 12 foot parabolic dishes — one towed on a trailer.<\/p>\n As I had found in my own experiments, the hard part is finding two places within line-of-sight of one another that are far enough away to make the project interesting. These guys<\/a> set up one dish on a mountain in Nevada, and then drove into Utah<\/a>.<\/p>\n To get farther than mountaintop to mountaintop, some Swedish folks<\/a> put a WiFi unit in a balloon and sent it up to an altitude of over 18 miles, and received signals from it as far away as 195 miles away. They used a 6 watt amplifier, since a 12 foot parabolic dish is a little heavy for a weather balloon to lift, and somewhat hard to aim.<\/p>\n Years ago I used my amateur radio equipment to talk to astronauts in the Space Shuttle<\/a> and International Space Station<\/a>. There are amateur satellites in orbit<\/a> that store and forward email to amateurs around the world. WiFi and satellites<\/a> are already connected to provide Internet access to recreational vehicles. It seems to me it is only a matter of time before a low earth orbiting WiFi access point breaks all earthly records for distance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I live on a mountain. I get my high speed Internet by using a microwave link from a tower on the hill near the house to the top of a tall building in San Jose, a distance of about 11 miles. Since that link provides me with much more bandwidth than I actually use, even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[81,80,82],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scitoys.com\/sciblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}