HOLY $H!T - Long Distance Wi-Fi (Up to 25 KILOMETER range!?)
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,258 words · ~11 min read
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okay so my original plan for these yes these right here these are this is some
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cool stuff that we got going on right here was to share the gigabit internet
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connection we have here at the office with my house which is about 20 km or
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about 13 miles away unfortunately
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Topography is a I would need a 60 M
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antenna tower here at the office in order to achieve that so we are going
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back to square one with this video and we are going to structure this as holy
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episode four yes we are already on episode four of this segment and we're
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calling this one longdistance
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Wi-Fi the master case 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your
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midtower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories check
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check out the link in the video description to learn more so this is the
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power beam AC a device that I assumed would be a lot more expensive than it
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was I mean ubiquity sent it to us so I had to look up how much it costs it's
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only about 150 bucks and with the kit
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you actually get a variety of things you get this uh weather resistant plastic
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shell cover you get this metal dish you
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get this pole mount right here
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uhhuh you get this fastening rear housing doad you get this thing which is
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like a mount for the other mount to mount the other thing with degrees on it
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and then right here you get the antenna feed this is where the action happens
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you also get a power over Ethernet adapter injector thing as well because
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it is powered using PoE so on the side of this guy you've got your power as
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well as your link indicator and then four bars to indicate the of the link
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and that's pretty much it oh wait except you get two of them because the point of
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the power beam AC is to be able to handle a 450 megabit Link at up to
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25 km now we are not going to be able to
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mount these puppies up high enough in order to test that maximum range but
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what we can do is we can at least do a limited test here in the parking lot and
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find out if the objective was to share a network connection with someone quite
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far away whether it's a shed or whether it's a neighbor or whether it's from
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your office to your house if you happen to live somewhere flatter whether this technology looks
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pretty promising okay so the assembly process is pretty straightforward you
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take your antenna feed and you no wait oh shoot I forgot okay
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uh right you start with this
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bracket you take this bad boy and pop it under here it only goes in one way
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then yeah you pop this into
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here until it
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clicks there we go then you take your
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pull mount stick it through the thing and finally optionally you can put
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on the weatherproofing mount something that I would definitely recommend please
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note and this was pointed out to me by my editor the last time around when we
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did this before our SD card died that this Arrow corresponds
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to I was sure there was an arrow ah this Arrow right here if you want it to go on
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relatively easily now normally you'd have some kind of a pole mount here so
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you'd go ahead you'd put that on the pole and then you'd tighten it in and it
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would grip like that but because we don't have a pole at least not that kind
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of pole if you know what I mean we're just going to go ahead and clamp it to a
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c for our initial testing okay so the PO
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adapter here is optional if you have a power over Ethernet switch but not
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everyone has one of those so we're going to show it using the adapter yes we have
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power then from there without dropping
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it you plug into the network Port of a
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computer so we're configuring our Internet Protocol version for settings
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192.168.1 anything other than 20 or over
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254 or whatever it is so I'm going to go with 10 subnet mask we can leave as
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default when you click it on there and we're going to set our default gateway
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to 192168 1.20 and click okay and check it out
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we're logged into ros7 so the first thing it tells you to do is change your
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password I wish that more companies did
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this where they actually force you to change your password before you can do
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pretty much anything else but they don't
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and such is life so now what we need to do is we have to configure it with a
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static IP address that is on the same
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subnet as the rest of our Network
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so uh let's make it that and configuration mode is simple we
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actually have to change almost none of the settings on this bad boy to get it
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up and running which is very very cool okay so now that we've Recon jiggered
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our network settings we can go ahead and plug into an Ethernet cable that is on
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the rest of the network that we want to share and then I'm switching back to my
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Wi-Fi here because I'm going to use this direct attach cable to set up the other
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dish in a minute uh but now we should be able to navigate to it at the new
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address that I've set for it
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Wicked okay so now that this is set up we're going to go to wireless and we are
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going to set up the mode so this is
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going to be station point to point so it was actually already correct the SSID we
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can make whatever we want this is kind of like just a normal wireless hotspot
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um for all intents and purposes here then I am going to turn our output power
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way down because we're testing at very close range here and I'm going to leave
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pretty much everything else on auto except security so I'm just going to put
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a rudimentary password on here which is better than nothing and I'm going to
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save my changes so as soon as this dish
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here we go detects long range SSID with the correct
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password it should connect to it and we should have a link first we need to hook
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up the other dish or configure it
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rather ow a damn that hurt it is highly
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recommended to configure these while you are still very close to them not after
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you have deployed them 25 km apart okay
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so we're logged into our second unit now what we're going to do is set up our
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network settings uh differently from the last one so instead of 64 we're going to
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go 66 so we have to go ahead and put
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this one then onto the main Network here
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we are very close actually okay so we are on our last step
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now we go to wireless on the second unit
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this one is access point peer-to-peer so
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the SSID we used was long range okay leaving everything on auto
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turning the output power
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way down okay so the further the distance the
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more important perfect alignment is but at this kind of distance it really
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doesn't matter much so I'm going to plug in my PoE injected powered thing so this
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guy gets power and then what you should see on that side if you go around the
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side of the dish is in a moment here the
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link indicator should light up hey there
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we go all right rock on so now we've got
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a link let's test it so okay so now what we do is we go back and change those
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custom network settings we go back to automatic everything blippity blop done
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I'm plugged from the laptop into my pee
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injector into the dish which is connected to the dish which is connected
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to the server room which is not disorienting at
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all from there we should be able to get
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an internet connection
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boom yeah baby all right okay now speed
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test isn't always a solid indicator for us around here I don't know what it is
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exactly but the good news is that we're seeing very consistent results here at
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least we were and while not 450 megabit
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per second and the wow the upload is
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going much better than the down link
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that's very interesting we are still seeing speeds that are pretty darn
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reasonable looking for our uh our Dish Dish
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Wi-Fi what else we got in here oh they have other tests too so they have they
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have their own internal speed test so you can go ahead and go oh yeah I want
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to use this one here's my username and
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password and start and this will tell
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you the just raw receive and transmit
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speeds between the two units and we have
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a solution this right here is a portable
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battery bank doesn't look exceptional there's where it charges
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boom AC outlet so we're going to use
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that to power the dish at the other end of the parking lot now there is one more
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tool we're going to need that I didn't show you guys before this is really cool
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this is the Align antenna tool so you
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can see right here what the signal levels are in real time so watch as I
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move the dishes so they Point more towards each other
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and the theoretic
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signal strength
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improves ah and there goes my battery Bank oh I hope that didn't
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break okay a
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crap this is a lot heavier than I had hoped maybe I should help you no no it's
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fine I got this I get it camera people Union can't
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actually lift a bloody finger to help me with anything
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okay sorry I got this i got this
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okay so I'm just going to start
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hiking okay so with poor alignment at the
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lowest possible strength we are still
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seeing about 200 megabit per second up
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and down and that's with Ed standing
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right in the way of the antenna way to go Ed actually it didn't go down
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much so inside the building you had to make pretty big
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changes to the dish Aline m in order to really affect this here I am barely even
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touching it so here we are way down the
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road still enjoying that was pretty much the same
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speed test we were doing on the down link
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and however confusing this might be it actually seems to be running a little
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bit faster on the Uplink so there you go you can interpret that
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however you want I'm sure with all some tuning we could actually get better
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needs out of it particularly down there's probably something where I don't
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really know what I'm doing but in spite of ubiquity offering to have one of
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their Engineers help me I was like ah I want to see if I can do it let's see
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what kind of a result someone can get just following the most basic rudimentary guide and there you have it
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holy long distance 5 GHz like beam
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access point point too thing going on here very freaking cool so guys if you
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video description or also linked in the video description that my car is driving
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past also linked in the video description I mean can you imagine that
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okay so so you know there's street hockey right so everyone's all like car
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so you got your like Wi-Fi dish going across the road it's like you're in the
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middle of a like DOTA match it's like hold hold on everyone hold on my car
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car maybe that's less funny than I thought it was anyway the third way to
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badge and I think that's pretty much it so if you're wondering what to watch next and you're thinking wow these guys
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make great videos how about checking out the last episode of holy [ __ ] the one
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where we checked out a battery the size of
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me watch out for that truck
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hey we're trying to internet here