61–67 of 67 posts
I vaguely remember some sort of stunt where they had got hold of two 3 meter dishes paired them with off the shelf wifi radios, mounted one on a pickup truck and drove out across a dry lake bed. 53 miles before signal loss is what I remember. I will probably never be able to find the source, and my poor memory probably inflated the range like any good fish story.
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Why would you piss about using amateur radio for that when you can go 20-30km with cheap off-the-shelf microwave links?
In which frequency band? 2.4GHz?
If you want further you can spend about a ton and get a pair of LiteBeam 5ACs instead.
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In which frequency band? 2.4GHz?
2.4 or 5.8GHz - take a look at the NanoStation 5ACs. They cost pennies and have about 15km range. If you want further you can spend about a ton and get a pair of LiteBeam 5ACs instead.
Over shorter range, but still more than what those low power devices can do, you could stream multiple 4K videos simultaneous where the low power devices would be crawling.
Not many people will need to do this, especially with the limits on encryption, but that's OK. Ham radio is not supposed to substitute for other radio services. It's supposed to be about learning about radio and providing a backup when other systems fail during disasters.
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2.4 or 5.8GHz - take a look at the NanoStation 5ACs. They cost pennies and have about 15km range. If you want further you can spend about a ton and get a pair of LiteBeam 5ACs instead.
With a ham license you could use up to 1500W, which is around 200x what those have. If you were on top of a mountain and had a friend on top of a mountain 150 km away you could establish a reliable, stable point to point WiFi connection. Over shorter range, but still more than what those low power devices can do, you could stream multiple 4K videos simultaneous where the low power devices would be crawling. Not many…
Power doesn't make it go faster or further.
You can easily go 150km with a few hundred milliwatts and get 322Mbps with a few hundred quid's worth of equipment if you've got good clear line-of-sight, but you need to go to a way higher frequency than 5.8GHz.
Also, don't forget that there's a difference between TX power and EIRP - when I had my amateur radio Foundation licence and was limited to 10 watts, I was running 10W at the antenna port as measured on the terribly expensive Marconi test set - but well over 150W EIRP totally legally by simply using a decent aerial. This also meant that instead of blasting everything around with RF and only hearing fairly close stations, I could hear about as far as I could transmit.
Finally, I think you're grossly underestimating the cost and complexity of something that'll output 1500W on 2.4GHz, which would be incredibly expensive and difficult to operate.
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With a ham license you could use up to 1500W, which is around 200x what those have. If you were on top of a mountain and had a friend on top of a mountain 150 km away you could establish a reliable, stable point to point WiFi connection. Over shorter range, but still more than what those low power devices can do, you could stream multiple 4K videos simultaneous where the low power devices would be crawling. Not many…
Well, no, you couldn't, because that's kind of not how it works. Power doesn't make it go faster or further. You can easily go 150km with a few hundred milliwatts and get 322Mbps with a few hundred quid's worth of equipment if you've got good clear line-of-sight, but you need to go to a way higher frequency than 5.8GHz. Also, don't forget that there's a difference between TX power and EIRP - when I had my amateur rad…
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Well, no, you couldn't, because that's kind of not how it works. Power doesn't make it go faster or further. You can easily go 150km with a few hundred milliwatts and get 322Mbps with a few hundred quid's worth of equipment if you've got good clear line-of-sight, but you need to go to a way higher frequency than 5.8GHz. Also, don't forget that there's a difference between TX power and EIRP - when I had my amateur rad…
Power literally does make it go further and with higher SNR (so faster).
For bidirectional communications it is *always* better to use a more efficient aerial.
It's interesting that you think "better SNR means faster". How do you think that works?
How would you stream a couple of 4K video feeds over say the 40m band? Do you think other limitations might come into play before SNR ever did?
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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 re…
The difference between whitened data and encrypted data is that you can decode the whitened data if you have the correct receiver. Encryption uses a key so that you also need the correct key. You may not have a receiver for say FT8 that I may be transmitting, but you're also transmitting in Morse code which I never learned. Nothing is stopping either of us from receiving the other's transmission if we want to. I'm to…