It might come as a surprise to some that IEEE, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, does more than send out mailers asking people to renew their memberships. In fact, they also maintain various electrical standards across a wide range of disciplines, but perhaps the one most of us interact with the most is the 802.11 standard which outlines WiFi. There have been many revisions over the years to improve throughput but the 802.11ah standard actually looks at decreasing throughput in favor of extremely increased range. Just how far you can communicate using this standard seems to depend on how many drones you have.
802.11ah, otherwise known as Wi-Fi HaLow, operates in the sub-gigahertz range which is part of why it has the capability of operating over longer distances. But [Aaron] is extending that distance even further by adding a pair of T-Halow devices, one in client mode and the other in AP (access point) mode, on a drone. The signal then hops from one laptop to a drone, then out to another drone with a similar setup, and then finally down to a second laptop. In theory this “Dragon Bridge” could allow devices to communicate as far as the drone bridge will allow, and indeed [Aaron] has plans for future revisions to include more powerful hardware which will allow even greater distances to be reached.
While there were a few bugs to work out initially, eventually he was able to get almost two kilometers of distance across six devices and two drones. Something like this might be useful for a distributed network of IoT devices that are just outside the range of a normal access point. The Dragon Bridge borrowed its name from DragonOS, a Linux distribution built by [Aaron] with a wide assortment of software-defined radio tools available out of the box. He’s even put in on the Steam Deck to test out long-distance WiFi.
How do you propose to prevent wifi spectrum from turning into a version of 11 meters ? or 14.3 on HF.
Is there any deconfliction strategy ?
i think the answer to your question is that the 802 standards are all full of conflict management, and will scale decently well until it becomes too congested and something has to be done. generally, i think / hope it will ‘get worse’ at a slow rate, giving people time to decide whether they are willing to accept the existing congestion before they deploy new uses. i.e., people use wifi because of (and only as long as) it works.
but mostly, i don’t understand the 11 meter problem? are you referring to CB? is the problem that too many people use it, or that no one can use it? i’m totally ignorant
2.4 Ghz WiFi in high-density is probably already soooo much worse than you think. In a high density location like apartments 5Ghz can sometimes be intelligible further than 2.4, despite the penetration issues, because the channels are a quarter the size they should be for the modulations and there’s no followed standard on which larger channels should be used. Combine this with non-US geographies having a way to cram an extra channel of 802.11g into the spectrum if they don’t follow the 1/6/11 map for non-conflicting 802.11b and automatic channel choice leads to automatic interference. The deconfliction only works if you’re on the same channel.
The channel width upgrades are actually defined on 5GHz so if you look at a channel graph it’s beautifully ordered and people get to share the spectrum.
It would be nice to just have a long range wifi antenna and point it out into the woods, and receive data from somewhere out there, but the downside is that you have to build and maintain your own network wherever you want to deploy the devices, so it becomes difficult and expensive quite fast. You need the internet connection, the gateway hardware, the electricity…
The advantage of “HaLow” over something like LoRa seems dubious at best.
It seems like a good idea if you ignore the WIFI part of it. There’s all kinds of other radio protocols with much longer ranges that live sub 1GHz. Remember, higher frequency gives lower range but higher data rates.
In theory, yes, but for practical IoT deployment you still would rather use some common and bog standard protocol, so you wouldn’t have to rely on some rare single supplier for your hardware, and use something that everybody else uses so you don’t have to set up and maintain your own network.
Hence, cellular or LoRaWAN.
The very long range IoT technologies that promise to span tens of kilometers from a single tower… well, they don’t. Not in the real world. You’ll get a message through once in a blue moon, but you can’t build much on that.
What’s the loiter time on these? How often do you have to swap them out, and how manual an operation would that be? Automated docking and battery charging would help, I suppose.
now I envision a fleet of fixed-wing UAVs….
Yeah like a powered glider design (large wings that require very little power to make lift) with solar that can just fly a circle overhead almost indefinitely
Perfect application for power over tether. Commercial options are crazy expensive. Id love to see a HAD challenge change that.
To be fair ardupilot wiki had a tutorial using extension cords like 4 years ago.
Wait, you can extend a network by passing on the information from one device to another? How crazy is that? So in theory a network could span the whole world of over could just connect enough devices together? Imagine what I’ve could do with such a network!!!!!
/s
There is already such a network, I believe you heard of it already… they call it “internet.”
It’s the same principle, but the links are longer.
I suppose you could put those repeaters on balloons for indefinite loiter time. But that would be a loonie idea…
Halo maintains compatibility in the 802.xx realm with the upside of 900 mhz distance. There are different chip vendors that provide different speed solutions
I have trouble with mesh. How setup mesh network? OpenWRT and mesh. No setup routers but add this same configuration .
How put this same image to router and using it in mesh network?
So basically a wifi radio repeater
You can do the same with 2.4ghz and a Tower with a directional antenna or antenna with a extremely low takeoff angle relative to the horizon
Or use lte which basically does the same thing in the sub wifi ghz range between 900 and 2100mhz
If you really want some range use 10,6 2 meters or 70cm easily get miles of reception
But not running no gigabit
Maybe a few megabits, that’s if you can run full duplex and not half duplex like transceivers you can buy
But you’ll need certifications and a license to use that “wifi”
5-10 watts of vhf/uhf easily can reach out 50 miles in the right terrain
10-20 watts of 10 meters or 6 meters can reach the moon and back, and circumnavigate Earth
Its easy if you just modify packet radio and build a tnc (essentially a modem) bridge that can do tcp/ip stack, packet radio already uses fsk,psk, could use gfsk or qpsk
Even more possible with digital radios but you can use analog modes too
So basically a wifi radio repeater
You can do the same with 2.4ghz and a Tower with a directional antenna or antenna with a extremely low takeoff angle relative to the horizon
Or use lte which basically does the same thing in the sub wifi ghz range between 900 and 2100mhz