Long range WiFi

This was pretty useful for running security cameras as well as just having wifi handy at the glider field. Said glider field was approximately 5 miles from my house but key to making this possible is having "line of sight" between the two points. Above 50 Mhz or so, radio frequencies only reliably propagate to where you can visibly see. You can often get a bit farther than visible line of sight thanks to reflection/refraction but it's limited. The other big part to making this happen is the hardware. Standard wifi devices obviously do not have a 5 mile range. This is primarily due to their omnidirectional antennas and lower transmit power. Here's the big picture of how this worked:

The remote router is just a normal, home-office style router with wifi and serves as the wifi hotspot allowing regular wifi devices to connect. I had the ubiquiti radios configured in "bridge mode" so the remote routers get an IP address from my home router, minimizing the number of NAT traversals. Here's how one of the remote setups looked:

An antenna like this has a lot of "gain", that is directionality over an isotropic radiator. The flip side to that means aligning the antennas is crucial to getting a good signal, or actually a signal at all. I eyeballed both sides to get it close, and then fine tuned it using the uniquiti antenna alignment tool. That's a page in the web-based UI that continually reports the received signal strength. You can adjust the antenna to get the strongest signal. Getting the initial link is the hardest part however, as you are trying to adjust both sides at once without any direct feedback. A person on both ends would definitely help.

There was no grid power here so I used a small solar system to power things. The solar panel is visible in the image above. Below, you can see the charge controller, router, and a small DC distribution block.

Out of sight is a large 12v, 100 Ah AGM storage battery. This is a bit overkill for powering this equipment but sometimes it needs to ride through several days of clouds, or even snow. These large "high voltage" panels are often as cheap as a smaller 12v panel and have vastly more power output. I think that one in the picture is 280 watts. An MPPT controller allows using these higher voltage panels on 12v batteries efficiently and without overcharging the battery. I have written more about these small solar systems on this page.

I was using Wyze cameras, which are powered via USB cables. I used these 12v USB power supplies to power the cameras directly from the 12v.

12v to 5v USB converter