[somat]

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.

[d0vs]

https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/wifi_and_bluetooth_dis...

[zikduruqe]

I shot a 2.4 GHz path over 24 miles at 100 Mbps using Ubiquity bullets and their grid pack dishes. It's not that hard.

[holgerschurig]

This are however just records. E.g. "I still have a connection".

These records aren't really usable in real-life, e.g. to view a movie. When it rains, or is foggy.

Just mounting a maneuvering 3 m dish to your laptop isn't everyones most desired leisure ...

[simoncion]

> This are however just records. E.g. "I still have a connection".

This chatter about a successful 2005 Defcon shootout [0] indicates that a 125 mile link was able to pass traffic sufficiently reliably to be used for SSH, VNC, and other applications summarized as "etc" for several hours.

The one that somat appears to be thinking about was the year before and set up a ~55 mile link. The Wired article about it [1] doesn't say much about what data was shoved over the link, just that they "...shot a signal from one station to the second station with an encrypted message provided by the judges.", suggesting that at least some data transfer was required to consider the attempt valid.

> Just mounting a maneuvering 3 m dish to your laptop isn't everyones most desired leisure ...

That would have to be a very fancy dish to handle targeting a spot 1.5Km+ away while attached to a device that's being manhandled. I imagine it'd make much more sense to put the dish on a fixed mount and wire it up to the laptop, run wired ethernet from the AP to the laptop, or have a second radio in an AP to provide service to nearby clients.

[0] <https://groups.google.com/g/SOCALWUG/c/5T5wekafdv8>

[1] <https://defcon.org/html/links/dc_press/archives/12/wired_wif...>

[fragmede]

Yeah, I met Radio when he was at MIT. He got a black badge from Defcon for it.