[VLM]

"signal strength should dramatically decrease over distance."

One of the very few things they got right from a physics perspective is your eyes respond vaguely logarithmically. Its supposedly not really, deep in the decimal points theres a buried power law factor and a buried linear factor at low levels, but close enough to log for all astronomical purposes. They worked with an astro-biologist per the article; I assume this is the "astro-" portion contribution.

Google for astronomical magnitude and there's also some interesting quantitative chemical analysis stuff having to do with light adsorption. In my misbegotten youth I spent a lot of time in a chem lab squirting weird stuff into sample tubes and hovering over an ancient spectrophotometer. A spectrophotometer is kind of like what an EE would call a RF network analyzer, but for light waves, sort of. At least that's the best EE analogy I can come up with. Eventually I spent most of my lab time daydreaming about getting home to play with electronics and computers; why was I trying to become a chemist? It was pretty interesting stuff to experience in retrospect.

The visibility is... questionable. Google for "clear air return" and WSR-88d and stuff like that. A "decent" wx radar is sensitive enough to get at least some return from turbulence. How do you know its not just ground clutter? Because the doppler shift matches the direction and speed (more or less) of ground instruments. The questionable bit is clear air return is a bazzilion dB reflection loss below actual real reflectors so it would be incredibly faint compared to actual reflectors.

Also the humorous artistic waves don't show multipath like real waves. Not unusual in an urban environment to end up multipath limited not raw sig strength limited, at least in other applications; donno if wifi is usually limited like that.