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We lived for a year in some mountains in Mexico in an off-the-grid cabin. We became accustomed to everything (energy starvation, driving 30 mins to the nearest
by pier25 6y ago
We lived for a year in some mountains in Mexico in an off-the-grid cabin. We became accustomed to everything (energy starvation, driving 30 mins to the nearest village, 2 hours to the nearest city, etc) except the lack of connectivity.
I bought one of those huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away. It was empty after 2pm so we had 4Mbps just for ourselves all afternoon and night (if we had a sunny day and our batteries were full). That lasted about 8 months until someone built a barn or something and installed some electricity poles. We weren't able to connect anymore.
After that we drove almost daily to the village and spent a couple of hours in a café with a flaky 2Mbps connection but it became unpractical. We went back to civilization 2 months later or so.
If Starlink would have been available back then maybe we'd still be living in the mountains!
- flexvision 6y ago> huge Wifi antenna to connect to an open Wifi of a rural school a couple of kilometers away That's impressive, but how did this work from the school's side? Wouldn't they need a huge wifi antenna too?
- pier25 6y agoThey had regular wifi access points, nothing fancy. The huge antenna [1] was connected to an Alfa R36 hotspot which was fairly powerful. I guess that's why it worked. [1] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81Zwin2Z-ML._AC_SX466_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81Zwin2Z-ML...
- nrki 6y ago"huge" antennas usually have high gain, which increases your signal-to-noise ratio - both Rx and Tx. So one can "hear" signals further away and "speak" softer than would.be normally necessary.
- mehrdadn 6y agoWhere do you buy a WiFi antenna like that? Would you have any example links to what they're like?
- coronadisaster 6y agoHave you looked into WISPs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_provider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov... You can even setup your own.
- pier25 6y agoThis was 7 years ago and I'm pretty sure even today nobody offers WISP in that area. One of our neighbors who lived a couple of kms from us had a point-to-point Motorola antenna connecting with the closest village. We considered doing that but there was a mountain between us and the village which complicated things. Also connectivity in the area was so bad the only ISP available hadn't been signing new contracts for years. The region was difficult to access and wasn't particularly rich, it didn't make sense for ISPs to invest in upgrading 15 years old ADSL.