Goodness gracious. What was the range of your network? Trying that on a consumer AP would instantly lose the signal, I'd imagine
Re:A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
by JoshTriplett on Saturday March 04, 2017 @02:02PM
(#13792319)
Miles, easily. But we had three major advantages:
1) We had a shoulder-mounted directional antenna pointed at the rocket.
2) The rocket had a cylindrical patch antenna wrapped around it.
3) Wifi channel 1 is in an amateur radio band, which means we can amplify it beyond the normal limits. We ran it at 1W.
Re:A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
by joecool1029 on Saturday March 04, 2017 @02:33PM
(#13792516)
Eh, I run 1W EIRP on consumer equipment and it's legal[1]. Assuming you are in US? Or not?
Re:A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks
by JoshTriplett on Saturday March 04, 2017 @02:44PM
(#13792567)
US, but TTBOMK it wouldn't have been with the combination of amp and antenna. At the time, we'd looked it up and the legal limit without an amateur license was somewhere in the hundreds-of-milliwatts range.
Perhaps current-generation WiFi has more of an issue with that, but I've helped build systems that used a much older generation of WiFi in an ad-hoc (no AP) mode between nodes with a speed differential of Mach 1 (between a rocket and the ground). It worked fine, and lost almost no packets over the course of the flight.