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Re:The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining by nunesvn on Monday April 01, 2024 @10:38PM (#39901860)
I don't know if this is fake, but it could be true. I had a similar situation working for a WISP around 2010.

Every night, for about 10 minutes, the connections from our HQ to a relay tower became flaky. At the time we were using two Mikrotik 5GHz cards and some large antennas.

You could sit in front your computer and wait, a few minutes after the sunset, for the monitoring alerts start arriving. After a week trying everything, including changing hardware (to the same specs), I was very disappointed with the thing and got out to smoke around the sunset.

Then some huge lamps we had around the building switched on, based on a light sensor. Immediately I received the SMS alerts on my phone. I ran into the building, turned off the external lights and bingo: 0% packet loss.

It turns out that the building management had changed all of external lamps the week before, with new sodium-vapor bulbs. And for some reason, on the first 5 to 10 minutes with these lights on, it caused very high interference on the 5GHz band.

Changed the lamps, problem solved.

Re:The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining by justsomehnguy on Monday April 01, 2024 @11:05PM (#39901982)
> And for some reason

The ballast and the bulb itself are quite noisy in RF and then they are heating up they even more noisier.

Re:The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining by cortesoft on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @11:57AM (#39907233)
I am just surprised that line of sight issues weren't the first thing checked when you have a bespoke line of sight networking setup, especially when there was no local packet loss.
Re:The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining by heyoni on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @12:49AM (#39913699)
That whole article felt oddly empty. Like you could read the title and conclusion and be totally fine and satisfied.