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The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

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Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#151

Post by obi1kenobi »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #132

When I started reading this it seemed like “internet” and WiFi were being conflated, for example on our neighbourhood WhatsApp group there are often people asking “Is anyone else’s WiFi down?”, when what they should ideally be asking is if anyone else’s (fibre) internet is down. In such cases I internally frown a little, but leave it there. Anyway, for the situation in this link, they actually have a WiFi bridge from…

(Author here) Yeah, my dad's company does this stuff for a living, so I learned to distinguish all the terminology very early on :)

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#152

Post by fsckboy »

freedomben wrote: post #123
jordigh wrote: post #15

Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.

Oh man, this is one of my favorite lines of all time: > "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--" > "Geostatisticians..." > "--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."…

it's a useful analysis. Nobody thought of router hops, but this pattern is pretty much what you'd expect, so it was a very good hint.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#153

Post by jffhn »

neon5077 wrote: post #137

Here's my own 500 mile email story. This happened to me about a year ago. Just a normal day at the office when suddenly the internet drops out, except for my machine. Everyone else has a network connection, but no internet. Except for me, I can't reach devices on the local network, but I can reach anything outside. Now, our network is not large or complicated. We have a consumer grade ONT and WiFi router provided by…

Here is mine.

The admins could connect to their machines, but not to any user machine.

It was winter and we had some heating issues, so I made a script "warmup_the_office.sh" that was meant to launch a "while(true){}" on each core of each PC of the office, but instead launched itself indefinitely on each and all reachable machines, exhausting all pids and preventing distant logging. We had to reboot everything by hand, after some nice warmup.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#154

Post by hunter2_ »

neon5077 wrote: post #137

Here's my own 500 mile email story. This happened to me about a year ago. Just a normal day at the office when suddenly the internet drops out, except for my machine. Everyone else has a network connection, but no internet. Except for me, I can't reach devices on the local network, but I can reach anything outside. Now, our network is not large or complicated. We have a consumer grade ONT and WiFi router provided by…

Does your machine have a cellular modem that gets prioritized only when there's no route to some well-known service via the normal network adapter? And you disabled it (but forgot to mention doing so in this story) around the same time as swapping routers?

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#156

Post by Sharlin »

swores wrote: post #139
Sharlin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. Reminds me of the fact that militaries really don't want wind turbines in areas where good radar coverage is important (case in point: the Finnish Defense Forces anywhere near the Russian border); even though the blades aren't metal, they're still a source of noise and radar shadow.

I'm not at all knowledgable about this, but: is it feasible (and if so, hard?) or impossible to have some sort of live reporting from the turbines about the speed/position of their blades that connects to the radar system allowing it to ignore what it knows to be turbine noise/shadow and therefore be able to have turbines there and still get good radar?

Well, you can't just ignore a radar shadow or noise. Just like GP's point-to-point microwave link couldn't just "ignore" the crane. You can't make a bad Wi-fi connection faster by just telling your computer to ignore the wall between you and the hot spot. A wind turbine is a solid obstacle that conceals stuff behind it, and even if a single turbine might not be a big deal, most commonly someone interested in harnessing wind power would want to build an entire farm, which would be much worse.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#157

Post by gerdesj »

Some years ago I put in a point to point wifi link for a family member, from house to garage "block". I specified a pair of Ubiquity Nanostations which are tiny, PoE powered and have a decent range.

The house end is inside a UK standard tiled roof - dense 3/4", allow for slat, so 1"+ thick and dense material.

The other end is 20m away (LoS) and external mounting was forbidden. The garage block has foil lined Kingspan style insulation. I managed to mount that end near enough to a skylight window to work OK. I then daisy-chained an access point off it.

All was fine until the sky light was replaced with a metalicised one. The signal just about worked until it rained which was enough to nobble it.

When it got annoying enough, me and said family member plotted and I rocked up when someone was absent for the weekend. I moved the garage station to the outside. It now looks like a bird box. I put up a real bird box at the other end too. The fake box would get baked in the sun but the real one is always shaded.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#159

Post by seabass-labrax »

dmurray wrote: post #113
duxup wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a customer who used a line of sight system for extending their network across part of a city. I had a shortcut on my desktop with the weather for that town ready when they would inevitably call and blame our unrelated equipment for some problem.

I used to work in high-frequency trading. I had several tabs permanently open to the live weather radar feed for regions where we had microwave towers: the NE USA, the South of England, the Alps...

I'm curious to know where your towers were. Do you know if they still exist? Were your microwave antennae co-located on other operators' towers (e.g. those for VHF radio), or did your company have towers all to itself?

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#160

Post by hughdbrown »

I got this far:

"The office and our apartment were a few blocks away from each other..."

and figured it had to be a line of sight transmission.

I encountered this in summer of 1993 when the company I worked at installed infrared (I think) transmission across our two offices, separated by 250m. When the summer sun swept behind the transmitter in the northwest-ish, the wifi went out for about an hour each evening.

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