The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by OJFord » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 10:55 PM UTC

obi1kenobi wrote: post #146

hbn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not bragging, I'm just saying if you have one custom, specialized part in your setup that's particularly out of the ordinary and prone to failure, I'm surprised you wouldn't start there. If you're e.g. running a piece of software with a crazy custom plugin that overhauls major functionality and then an update to the base software breaks everything, it shouldn't be TOO much of a mystery on where to start looking.…

(Author here) I didn't forget, it just didn't seem like the most likely problem. Like I said in a reply to a sibling to your comment, the gear was ~10yrs old at the time and had been working fine until then. It was perched in a very inconvenient spot because it had to "look around the corner" of the building, so checking the line of sight wasn't just a case of looking out the window. I went in order of "most likely t…

But rain is more obviously related^ to a point to point link than aging hardware or some kind of bad update?

(^though of course the improvement is surprising! I assumed there was antennae involved, whether point to point or LTE or whatever, just from the title. The story to me was from the outset why's it better not worse in rain.)

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

#172

Post by anothernewdude » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 10:55 PM UTC

Here I thought it would be because it would be interfering with noise from other networks.

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

#173

Post by zerd » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 10:56 PM UTC

asadhaider wrote: post #33

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.

First thing I thought of too. Anyone know if there a list of more articles similar to these three?

The podcast that kills the car stereo episode of Reply All is pretty funny https://gimletmedia.com/amp/shows/reply-all/brh8jm

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

#174

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 11:08 PM UTC

obi1kenobi wrote: post #131

IshKebab wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in this case we're talking about hundred+ yards/meters instead of just a couple. Sure but didn't you say you were using directional antennas?

No antenna is directional enough to overcome n^2 scaling. Especially not the mid-tier consumer-grade hardware I would have had access to at the time. Rough rule of thumb, a consumer-grade directional antenna (at least at the time, maybe they've improved in the last 10yrs) will give your signal strength a one-digit multiplier (say ~8x), meaning ~7-10dB. But that n^2 means that improvement only takes you 2-3x farther,…

Won't 20dB at each end do the job? You can get 16-17dB antennas for $35 these days. And a wire parabolic dish promising 23dB for $200.

7-10dB matches the antennas I personally use, but those antennas are smaller than my phone. You can get a lot more out of a three foot spike or a two foot dish.

(I'm assuming 2.4GHz and hoping they're not lying about the gain.)

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

#175

Post by TwoNineFive » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 11:09 PM UTC

hwayne wrote: post #6

I-M-S wrote: post #2

FYI this being part of "April Cools" series heavily implies it's not a real tech issue but a riff on the "We can only send an email within 500 km" / "Can't print on Tuesdays" kind of articles.

Hi! I helped review this story, and also am one of the organizers of April Cools. Two things: 1. u/obi1kenobi told me it was a real thing that happened to him 2. The point of April Cools is that the things aren't jokes. They're real essays written with care, just outside of the author's usual writing topics. Some of the other ones we got this year are about hydroponics, current events in Sumo wrestling, parenting, an…

Like the guy said, you can't be taken seriously. That's the problem with being a April fool. You are just a funny entertaining guy. Not a source of information.

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

#176

Post by thekevan » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 11:15 PM UTC

This is a bit ridiculous. How can you know that you have a ling of sight element to you network and not check that as the very first thing when you hear about rain effecting the wifi?

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

#177

Post by gerdesj » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 11:15 PM UTC

phyzome wrote: post #164

gerdesj wrote: post #157

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…

Why was subterfuge required? Something is missing from this story.

Look up WAF!

...

(Wife Acceptance Factor - far more important than Web App Firewall)

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

#178

Post by adammarples » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 11:17 PM UTC

The WiFi only works when it's raining (ps. one critical part of my WiFi setup is outdoors and depends on having a clear line of sight)

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

#179

Post by gerdesj » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 11:29 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #144

gerdesj wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which distro was that? ... asking for a friend ...

Just regular Ubuntu. It was around 2009 or so.

Thanks. I've never run Asterisk on Ubuntu. FreePBX is CentOS based which is mostly what I've run Asterisk on. I only started to worry about Ubuntu around 2012.

That mad IPv6 address thing must have stuffed up more than just a VoIP negotiation packet. DNS switches from UDP to TCP when responses get too large.

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

#180

Post by abhorrence » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 11:30 PM UTC

hobs wrote: post #13

smeeth wrote: post #8

I had an experience like this once! My my laptop would inexplicably and intermittently stop connecting to the internet. It turned out my bluetooth headset was using the same band as the wifi but I only figured this out after a few months and a replaced wifi card. I wouldn't wish that experience on my worst enemy.

Turns out most consumer electronics operate in the same unlicensed consumer bands, so your bluetooth mouse, headset, wifi, and microwave all tussle for the same stuff. I had a fun one where every time I would get out of my chair my monitors would turn off, turns out the EM fields from the compression/decompression can actually be enormous in some cases.

I've experienced something similar, but the chair's discharge was interfering with a PCI riser, tripping just over some threshold that would cause the OS kernel to panic and shutdown. It felt so incredibly unbelievable when we first noticed the correlation that we called tons of people over to watch us demonstrate it just to see if there was something else we were missing.