Funny thing about Wi-Fi, it overlaps with an Amateur radio band (the 2.4GHz spec does) and so hams are allowed to run Wi-Fi with no encryption but a tremendous amount of power and high gain antennas on like the highest channels.
A portion of the 5GHz WiFI band overlaps with the 5.8GHz ham band too. There are also a few WiFi radios that will also work above the US WiFi band where they can operate without interference from other license free devices. Those are used in the HamWAN network.
I wonder how much you could Jerry rig up Wimax for these days. That’s like 30 miles of range. I remember thinking if I was only going within a 15 mile area of my place it would have been cool, but prices 10 years ago immediately made it a no.
Edit: like it sounds dumb, but what prevents someone from picking up a used Wimax base station, putting it as an uplink from their router, then using a Wimax card to receive it? Could even maybe just rig up a small rechargable wifi box, that received the Wimax signal, then rebroadcasts it back out as wifi using your home network name/password. So anywhere near your home the antenna would just pick it up and rebroadcast, maybe just hook it to your cigarette lighter to charge so anytime your in the car it’s on. I assume most people would find it easier/cheaper to just buy a cellular card… haha. But hypothetically, I am curious what would make it not work
This has much greater range compared to wifi
Funny thing about Wi-Fi, it overlaps with an Amateur radio band (the 2.4GHz spec does) and so hams are allowed to run Wi-Fi with no encryption but a tremendous amount of power and high gain antennas on like the highest channels.
A portion of the 5GHz WiFI band overlaps with the 5.8GHz ham band too. There are also a few WiFi radios that will also work above the US WiFi band where they can operate without interference from other license free devices. Those are used in the HamWAN network.
I wonder how much you could Jerry rig up Wimax for these days. That’s like 30 miles of range. I remember thinking if I was only going within a 15 mile area of my place it would have been cool, but prices 10 years ago immediately made it a no.
Edit: like it sounds dumb, but what prevents someone from picking up a used Wimax base station, putting it as an uplink from their router, then using a Wimax card to receive it? Could even maybe just rig up a small rechargable wifi box, that received the Wimax signal, then rebroadcasts it back out as wifi using your home network name/password. So anywhere near your home the antenna would just pick it up and rebroadcast, maybe just hook it to your cigarette lighter to charge so anytime your in the car it’s on. I assume most people would find it easier/cheaper to just buy a cellular card… haha. But hypothetically, I am curious what would make it not work
You can transmit over whatever, but there’s trade-offs with everything. LoRa is kinda neat because it’s low power.
And you don’t need to be a ham to run it.
Might be smarter… wonder if