46 ms·

The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

• I-M-S 3y ago
  FYI this being part of "April Cools" series heavily implies it's not a real tech issue but a riff on the "We can only send an email within 500 km" / "Can't print on Tuesdays" kind of articles.
  • ghayes 3y ago
    > Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club: an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Please enjoy this true story, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon! The post’s disclaimer (and April Cool’s site itself) both imply that the goal is to touch on novel topics and should be genuine content of the author. That said, this story could clearly be apocryphal.
  • hwayne 3y ago
    Hi! I helped review this story, and also am one of the organizers of April Cools. Two things: 1. u/obi1kenobi told me it was a real thing that happened to him 2. The point of April Cools is that the things aren't jokes. They're real essays written with care, just outside of the author's usual writing topics. Some of the other ones we got this year are about hydroponics, current events in Sumo wrestling, parenting, and decaf coffee.
    • pvg 3y ago
      the organizers of April Cools. The org name April Tools was right there!
      • festive-minsky 3y ago
        Sorry, but why would 'April Tools' be better?
        • pvg 3y ago
          I'm not following, better than what?
          • fydorm 3y ago
            Why would the replacement name you suggested be better than the actual name?
            • pvg 3y ago
              Oh, I see. It wasn't a suggestion for a replacement, hence 'org' in there since they were talking about 'organizers'. They could have called themselves the April Tools. Just a dumb joke/unmissable opportunity to call some perfectly nice-seeming internet strangers a bunch of tools.
    • TwoNineFive 3y ago
      Like the guy said, you can't be taken seriously. That's the problem with being a April fool. You are just a funny entertaining guy. Not a source of information.
• mschuster91 3y ago
  I had more thought of an issue regarding bad grounding (i.e. grounding rods dried out and only work properly when the earth is wet), but trees are even more unexpected.
  • bdavbdav 3y ago
    This was my thinking. Or some other poorly seated electrical connection that somehow got better when it was damp.
  • brazzy 3y ago
    My guess was that water accumulates somewhere and bends the antenna out of alignment.
• user_7832 3y ago
  TIL about Fresnel Zones! > Interestingly, objects outside the straight line between antennas can still cause interference! For best signal quality, the Fresnel zone between the antennas should be clear of obstructions. But perfection isn't achievable in practice, so RF equipment like Wi-Fi uses techniques like error-correcting codes so that it can still work without a perfectly clear Fresnel zone. I wonder if other waves like pressure/audio waves also have a similar effect. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_zone (Side note, is this story old? 802.11n isn't particularly new enough to upgrade to.)
  • avianlyric 3y ago
    Yes they do. That’s what an echo is, sound waves bouncing off an obstacle between two points. That obstacle doesn’t need to be within the direct line of sight, just within the dispersion area of the outgoing sound wave. At the far end you’ll hear (although in reality, your brain will almost certainly cover this up for you) distortion caused by the sound wave defracting off the obstacle and interfering with the primary wavefront. Hence the reason why people put so much effort into design concert halls, and adding sound dampening treatments to recording studios. Obstacles will distort sound, but energy absorbing obstacles will distort less.
    • Intralexical 3y ago
      > At the far end you’ll hear (although in reality, your brain will almost certainly cover this up for you) distortion caused by the sound wave defracting off the obstacle and interfering with the primary wavefront. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation
  • progbits 3y ago
    > Side note, is this story old? FTA: > At the time, I was still a college student — this was over 10 years ago.
  • aidenn0 3y ago
    I wonder how much polarization affects things; I was once told that terrestrial FM Radio is transmitted with vertical polarization to reduce interference from tall objects between you and the transmitter. Terrestrial TV (some of which used bands that overlap FM radio) uses horizontal polarization.
• smeeth 3y ago
  I had an experience like this once! My my laptop would inexplicably and intermittently stop connecting to the internet. It turned out my bluetooth headset was using the same band as the wifi but I only figured this out after a few months and a replaced wifi card. I wouldn't wish that experience on my worst enemy.
  • hobs 3y ago
    Turns out most consumer electronics operate in the same unlicensed consumer bands, so your bluetooth mouse, headset, wifi, and microwave all tussle for the same stuff. I had a fun one where every time I would get out of my chair my monitors would turn off, turns out the EM fields from the compression/decompression can actually be enormous in some cases.
    • rrr_oh_man 3y ago
      > I had a fun one where every time I would get out of my chair my monitors would turn off Wait, can you elaborate? I have the same and I thought I was hallucinating or tripping a cable somewhere.
      • ctoth 3y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/f7g1sa/gas_lift_office_chairs_causing_emi/ https://old.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/f7g1sa/gas_li...
      • lights0123 3y ago
        https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-blanks-due-to-static-electricity-in-my-chair https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-... https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/09/office_chair_emissions/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/09/office_chair_emission...
        • hobs 3y ago
          Hah yep, I figured it out after reading the superuser post which led me to some ancient electrical engineer stuff. Update: reading the reg one, it also had no cusions, it was a standard herman miller so it was a mesh bottom and back.
• hinkley 3y ago
  I remember hearing about a few common failure modes for early internetworking of adjacent buildings. The first being running a bare twisted pair cable between buildings. Worked fine until the next lightning storm, and then a nearby strike fries the equipment on both ends. You have to use grounded conduit to run strands between buildings my dudes. But the other one was setting up WiFi between buildings, and tended to be more of a problem in academia because the yearly cycles make it a bit more likely. If you set it up in the fall, and everything works all winter until spring comes, when the water in the deciduous tree leaves attenuates the signal. The nasty part of this one is not the failure mode but the timing. Everyone has been happily using and depending on their sweet sweet bandwidth for six months and poof, it’s just gone one fine April morning.
• nothingneko 3y ago
  "Close the window you're letting all the WiFi out"
• bombcar 3y ago
  I had one recently - old Nintendo switch; worked fine when docked, couldn't get an internet connection on wifi. Turns out it had been so long that the wifi MAC was picking up a DHCP address that was blocked at the firewall; the dock had its own MAC so it got a good address.
  • jonhohle 3y ago
    Were you using an Ethernet adapter? The original switch dock has a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter and USB hub. It doesn’t do anything with networking. The OLED dock adds ethernet (and therefore a second MAC).
    • bombcar 3y ago
      It was the old switch in the new dock; which was why I was going insane. Both worked in the dock, but only the OLED worked outside the dock. Had to sit down and think about it for awhile before I realized it had to be the firewall blocking access somehow.
      • jonhohle 3y ago
        Haha, your OP said “old”, probably autocorrected. I thought, “OLED is new, not old!”
• xyzelement 3y ago
  The article briefly mentions that this was unbelievable because rain should make Wi-Fi worse not better. That parallels my experience but I didn’t realize was commonly understood. I noticed that in the hot summer the Wi-Fi reception in my yard (IE, farther from the access point in the house) is worse. Eventually I decided that summer heat is really proxy for humidity and that it wasn’t unreasonable for high water concentration in the air to provide an obstacle to Wi-Fi signal.
• jordigh 3y ago
  Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
  • tombert 3y ago
    The 500 mile email story is one of my favorite reminders that, fundamentally, we're still governed by the laws of physics. It's funny, but it's also a reminder that, while networks might be very fast, the latency is still going to be governed by the speed of light.
    • ck2 3y ago
      Well laws of physics is what gave us radio in the first place. Some of my favorite video documentaries are on how it was theorized and then slowly developed over years and decades until they finally got to spark-gap transmitters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_radio But just imagine listening to spark-gap morse code radio broadcasts for years as amateur and then suddenly someone does a broadcast test of actual voice (violin!) That must have been incredible to hear wirelessly. 24 December 1906 Reginald Fessenden, that was the leap that eventually gave us wifi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Fessenden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Fessenden
    • ortusdux 3y ago
      If we are doing classic stories - Grace Hooper and the Nanosecond of wire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_692464 https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_692464
    • hughesjj 3y ago
      I actually like thinking about the exchange of physical information as a network propagation delay, and entanglement/coherence as a distributed consensus algorithm. They're kinda samey from a conceptual point of view (in my amateur opinion)
• valzam 3y ago
  My Wifi doesn't work properly when it's raining, can be combine forces?
  • obi1kenobi 3y ago
    (Author here) I'm worried they might combine in a way that leaves them not working neither rain nor shine!
• neilv 3y ago
  The title might've been a Fleetwood (the other kind of) Mac reference. o/~ Wi-Fi's only working when it's rainin' Players only stutter when they're buff'rin' Websites, they will page load oh so slooooww When the rain falls down, you can download
• ck2 3y ago
  Actually experience the same thing but for different reasons. I've lived in the same place for 25 years, so I've seen the invention of wifi and then checking every few months for other users on wifi analyzer, I've seen it grown and grown. Well in that 25 years they've built so many surrounding apartment complexes that the 2.4ghz saturation is absolutely insane. I cannot believe how many networks show up on the analyzer in 2024, has to be well over 100. But when it rains, it cuts off dozens of those other apartments, and I get better signal inside my own apartment.
• progbits 3y ago
  Similar but opposite story: 20ish years ago I hung out in an IRC channel in which, during autumn/winter months, one person would frequently get disconnected and when he came back complained about foggy weather. He had a laser line or sight connection. It could handle rain (with some degradation), but thick fog killed it.
  • kayodelycaon 3y ago
    Yeah. If you're outside during a calm day with snow falling, it's unusually quiet because large fluffy snowflakes absorb sound. Fog does something very similar to optical or radio systems. Rain has much bigger droplets and far fewer of them. :)
  • outworlder 3y ago
    Funny. A few years ago I was on #chicken, and there was a person frequently connecting and disconnecting. Turns out they were on a boat and the motion of the boat would be enough to disrupt their wifi directional antenna. They were rigging a servomechanism to automatically aim the antenna and wanted to write the control software in Chicken Scheme (for whatever reason, never questioned because Chicken is fun).
• mungoman2 3y ago
  > The fix was easy: upgrade our hardware. This made me smile. My brain autocompleted the fix to something like "help the neighbors trim their tree", but of course the fix is new hardware.
  • themadturk 3y ago
    Well, that would have meant interacting with other people...
    • kyawzazaw 3y ago
      can't really be that entitled and ask them to cut their tree (or even if you do it by youself)
      • obi1kenobi 3y ago
        (I'm the author.) I really like trees! So I wouldn't have wanted to cut it down or even prune it. Also, I hate operational (ongoing) solutions to problems. Pruning it would have been exactly that kind of solution -- we'd have had to prune it regularly or else it would have kept being a problem every so often. The hardware fix was easier: our equipment was already a bit old and slow, the upgrade fixed the rain problem while also making it faster, and it's not something we've had to tweak since. I've long since moved out, but my parents still use that same 802.11n bridge today!
• cdme 3y ago
  I once had a Time Warner tech blame the moisture content of the air for impacting the copper cabling to explain outages at our apartment. This both makes more sense and, I suppose, is more interesting.
  • devilbunny 3y ago
    My parents’ house was connected to old copper phone lines from ca. 1940, and by the 1980s rain intrusion from long or heavy storms would cause massive static on the line (made worse when squirrels ran on the line). This was disastrous when I got my first modem ca 1986. Just unusable until it dried out.
    • cdme 3y ago
      Interesting! This was a relatively new apartment building in Hollywood with similarly aged cable — maybe he was right and I'm altogether wrong. They ran the cable up through vertically adjacent units as well which left you at some degree of mercy of your downstairs neighbors.
      • devilbunny 3y ago
        A wet month in Hollywood is drier than a wet day in the southeast US, but maybe.
• kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Sounds like it would be a neat excuse to get the children to go out when it's sunny!
• mart2d2 3y ago
  At Pinterest, when we were working from one of the founder's apartment, the internet went down. Lots of debugging later and we traced it to a cable that a squirrel had chewed threw..
• punnerud 3y ago
  Could also have be that the neighbor have a not compliant WiFi device that send out deauthentication packages, then it would also work better during rain. And the same upgrade would often fix it
• xeromal 3y ago
  This reminds me of when I took my PS5 to my family's house for Christmas vacation. We both have the same SSID because I set up both access points but they changed the password when they forgot it because they're a bunch of bozos. My PS5 controller refused to connect to my PS5 and I couldn't figure out why. I gave up and after a few days tried again only to realize that the PS5 controller can't connect to the PS5 wirelessly when the wifi was connected but the password was invalid. I still don't know why it was a problem or if it still is a problem but it was a monster to debug. lol The reason I didn't fix the wifi in the first place was that I didn't have a spare USB C to USB A cable to hardwire my controller and I was playing a singleplayer game. I think it was last of us.
• tantalor 3y ago
  I dislike calling this "magical thinking", just because the plausible causal relationship takes a little time to discover, it's not implausible at the outset. In fact, the causal relationship between rain & wifi is taken as a given by the author: > If anything, rain makes wireless signal quality worse It's not too surprising to discover a causal relationship between two things we already know are causally related.
  • superb_dev 3y ago
    You don't think it's unusual to find a positive correlation where there is usually a negative correlation?
    • tantalor 3y ago
      Unusual yes, magical no
• rconti 3y ago
  My guess was that the directional antennas were off by enough that it didn't work well in clear conditions, but the rain refracted the signal enough to work. The actual answer was better :D
  • d1str0 3y ago
    This was my first thought too. Tree makes more sense.
• mywacaday 3y ago
  I know of a case in the Caribbean where where a line of sight connection between two buildings of a bank was being interrupted by a tree from a competitor bank. They asked the competitor would they mind cutting the tree and the answer was sure for the small fee of 1 million, Third hand info but I did hear from a network guy I worked with.
  • zoeysmithe 3y ago
    The real lost opportunity here was figuring out the cost of running fiber instead of wireless and charging the $1 less than that for the tree trimming.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• MichaelMug 3y ago
  I recall there was a story about a computer mouse not working when it was sunny? It had to do with the sensor. I can't find it so I'm starting to doubt if that actually happened... Edit: Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37585548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37585548
  • kayodelycaon 3y ago
    Wouldn't surprise me. Optical mice don't like transparent or some translucent surfaces.
• akira2501 3y ago
  Offtopic. Not sure how you're styling your links, but in a dark mode view, they are effectively illegible. https://imgur.com/a/aSbpVF8 https://imgur.com/a/aSbpVF8
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• ColinWright 3y ago
  Another classic: Can log in while sitting down, can't log in when standing up. I need to find the reference ... Edit: OK, here's one version: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52pw/i_cant_log_in_when_i_stand_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
  • re 3y ago
    Based on the title, I expected this to somehow be related to "Office chair turns off monitors" (it wasn't, but that is also a good one). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004 [Edit: I see this one has also been mentioned a few times already in the thread]
    • bpye 3y ago
      I had experienced this one and felt like I was going mad, and then I guess the humidity changed and I gave up/stopped thinking about it. It wasn't until a couple years later I saw a post here about the gas cylinders causing monitors to blank.
  • Biganon 3y ago
    There's a Mister Bean episode in which his TV will only work when he's sitting next to it (where he obviously cannot see it). I think he manages to watch TV by creating a copy of himself with his clothes next to the TV, while he's sitting naked in front of it
  • pugworthy 3y ago
    I recall reading a variant of that where a terminal had a "print screen" button, and the claim was it would work when standing but not when sitting down (or was it vice versa). In the end there were two print screen buttons, only one of them functional, and one of them more obvious when standing (or sitting). These kind of stories are classic debugging parables that teach you to step back and consider what you may be assuming incorrectly when something absolutely doesn't make sense or seems impossible.
• drb999 3y ago
  Reminds me of an extremely similar case with a long distance microwave link at a mobile telecom provider in Australia that I worked for. They relied quite heavily on microwave link chains and this particular one was in northern Queensland where fixed lines were hard to find and no local engineers were locally present/aware of the changing environment. Every week day + Saturday, from 7-3 the link would keep cutting out intermittently. Then work fine and the rest of the day and on Sunday… a crane, building a new residential building would operate during those hours right in the middle of the microwave path. Many weeks of theories and time wasted until someone had a chance to visit. :)
  • Sharlin 3y ago
    Amazing. Reminds me of the fact that militaries really don't want wind turbines in areas where good radar coverage is important (case in point: the Finnish Defense Forces anywhere near the Russian border); even though the blades aren't metal, they're still a source of noise and radar shadow.
    • swores 3y ago
      I'm not at all knowledgable about this, but: is it feasible (and if so, hard?) or impossible to have some sort of live reporting from the turbines about the speed/position of their blades that connects to the radar system allowing it to ignore what it knows to be turbine noise/shadow and therefore be able to have turbines there and still get good radar?
      • smcl 3y ago
        Even if you ignored the turbines themselves, there would still be a "shadow" behind the turbines though I think? Which means you'd have a blind spot every now and then (when the wind is blowing and the turbines are active) which could be exploited by an enemy
        • obi1kenobi 3y ago
          Even if you are looking at the turbines "edge-on," there's probably going to be a noticeable Doppler return as well. Plastic drones with plastic propellers are still visible on radar because the tiny propellers spin super fast, so they light up like a Christmas tree on Doppler radar because the approaching vs receding velocities of the blades are so different.
• nate 3y ago
  While we're on the subject: I still can't solve this and thought you'd either laugh or you are the only people who know what I'm going through :) I have some fancy Asus Mesh wifi routers at home. I sit next to the cable modem and one mesh endpoint. My wife sits upstairs. there's an upstairs mesh endpoint but I think neither of us are usually connected to it (mostly serves to extend our connection to go to yard). But when my wife gets up from her desk and walks through our hallway (closer to the non often used mesh endpoint) our internet drops for a bit. My only guess is that the endpoints get mad at meat being in between their back haul? Anyone deal with this and figure out the solution?
  • isodude 3y ago
    Actually, if you take a peak in to the wifi logs on the asus mesh node, you might see that it freaks out and restarts the wifi service. There's a tail mode that is pretty nice. Restore to the default settings, make sure you have updated the firmware, and cross your fingers.
  • chedabob 3y ago
    EMI maybe? Certain chairs cause monitors to go blank for a few seconds. https://mastodon.social/@haeckerfelix/110272427676278609 https://mastodon.social/@haeckerfelix/110272427676278609
    • duffyjp 3y ago
      I think my chair does this, but only when I'm not sitting in it. Maybe my body absorbs the ESD? If I'm doing anything nearby and bump the chair there's a good chance my monitor will lose signal for a second. It happens with both HDMI and Displayport with a number of different GPUs and different computers. The USB-C connection has never had a problem. I'm in an older home with questionable wiring which I'm sure is also a factor. I'd replace the chair but it's so dang comfy.
  • madaxe_again 3y ago
    Strange as it may seem, try turning the power on each endpoint down. You may be getting signal from too many APs in the same place making the mesh elector freak out.
• stanleykm 3y ago
  As soon as they mentioned the directional wifi i knew it was something physically between the antennas but was guessing human behavior. The tree was a surprise.
• asveikau 3y ago
  Reminds me of a song by Fleetwood Mac. Wifi only woooorks when it's raaaaining ...
• Tade0 3y ago
  My Wi-Fi used to work better in the rain because our signal was fairly weak as it was coming from the apartment behind the wall and the channels were generally crowded so (I assume) rain helped to at least insulate us from the networks in the buildings across the courtyard.
  • hot_gril 3y ago
    That's what I thought this article would be about before I read it. I've observed the same thing before.
• emmanueloga_ 3y ago
  I own a Ford Focus and to this day I don't understand why sometimes the gear shifts make this cracking noise when decelerating to zero, but only when it is raining.
  • serf 3y ago
    car clutches and brakes famously act/sound different in the wet, maybe a clutch or friction material somewhere acting differently?
  • mulmen 3y ago
    ABS?
  • duffyjp 3y ago
    Is it a 2012-2016 model? Those have the PowerShift transmission (known as the PowerShit on forums) that had a class action settlement, though I think it's too late to cash in on that.
    • emmanueloga_ 3y ago
      yeah, maybe that's it :-/
• DonHopkins 3y ago
  That would be ironic on your wedding day.
• hbn 3y ago
  The unusual internet setup is pretty important information to bury a few paragraphs in. Once that was explained it seemed like they should have started by checking nothing was blocking the antenna before tediously running around plugging the laptop into things and following cables and checking power supplies on the networking equipment? Hindsight is 20/20 but I correctly guessed the ending as soon as that information was added.
  • yakkomajuri 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • keybored 3y ago
      There’s troubleshooting and then there’s the troubleshooting of the troubleshooting post-mortem. GP is just doing the latter.
    • jeppebemad 3y ago
      I think it’s a fair comment. A lot of readers on HN are adept debuggers, and will start to analyze everything from the first paragraph. By burying the lede like that, it feels like wasted time, to have begun debugging before the (incredibly important) part about the unusual setup was revealed. Seems almost implausible that the protagonist, with his technical knowhow, did not think of this earlier.. Anyway, it’s a matter of storytelling, and that matters!
      • yakkomajuri 3y ago
        I may have just picked this comment to express overall frustration so for that I apologize. But I don't know - writing is something that comes in a flow. This wasn't some deliberate clickbaity thing by the author, they just wrote it in a way that that made sense to them. It also seems that the author themselves did not consider the setup at first, which happens, as sometimes we have tunnel vision. You may criticize his abilities I guess, although overall it just felt like an account of things as they happened to the author, not considering how someone might be trying to guess things once they publish it. So yeah, I don't know, I just feel like there's too much negativity sometimes. But maybe I overreacted.
• jonhohle 3y ago
  My garage door opener works much better when it’s raining and also at night. I’m out case, our solar inverter (or one or more of the optimizers at the panels) creates enough noise to interfere. I also believe our microwave is adding noise to the same circuit our WiFi router is on. Despite using 5GHz, WiFi is severely degraded whenever the microwave is on.
  • AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
    You should get a new microwave. It's probably not the mains circuit, it's probably leaking enough radiation to overload the RF frontend on the router. If the router gets enough energy the "sine wave" of the radio signal starts to flatten out at the top and bottom and becomes a rounded off square wave which we call "clipping". This has the original frequency component, but also a ton of other frequency components that push up into much higher frequency bands like 5GHz. Fun fact, this is why electric guitars add a high pitch scratchy noise, they're reaching the distortion/clipping threshold of their amplifier.
• friggeri 3y ago
  I've had a similar weather experience where my internet connection dropped when it was cold. Turns out some water had seeped into the optical fiber connector, when it froze it broke the connection, and it would recover when it thawed. This one was a nightmare to troubleshoot.
• bongodongobob 3y ago
  I have a hard time believing this. Wifi can go through multiple walls. And if these were directional P2P links, they can easily go through and even around trees, I've deployed them in the past and they don't need perfect line of sight. Granted the equipment could have been cheap, but this sounds questionable. He's asserting that the a few leaves at the top of a tree were blocking it when it wasn't raining? Idk.
  • 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    I cannot know whether the story is true, but wet leaves definitely would interfere more with the link. The typical water content (and conductivity) of tree leaves is relatively low, and it could also be a factor apart from the aforementioned sagging due to the water's weight. It is also true though that rain water has low mineralisation, and therefore low conductivity.
  • obi1kenobi 3y ago
    I'm the author. Among other things, it's a distance problem -- WiFi can go through walls when the router is right there. But distance attenuates the signal as distance squared, and in this case we're talking about hundred+ yards/meters instead of just a couple.
    • bongodongobob 3y ago
      Fair point. I suppose it's very much device dependant. The P2P stuff I've used was good for a few km.
    • IshKebab 3y ago
      > in this case we're talking about hundred+ yards/meters instead of just a couple. Sure but didn't you say you were using directional antennas?
      • freedomben 3y ago
        a directional antenna increases the gain of the signal, but it doesn't fix the problem of decreasing with square of the difference and physical objects blocking signal. If the distance was already near the maximum, it wouldn't take much to block it.
• takinola 3y ago
  These are great stories but awful experiences to live through. I am currently going through one right now. My wireless CarPlay connection shuts off whenever I drive past a particular highway section. It never happens anywhere else but this one area. There is nothing of note happening there (it's on a bridge over a lake) but just like clockwork, my entertainment system shuts down and refuses to connect. I have tried everything (reboots, firmware updates, wired connections, etc) to no avail.
  • ranie93 3y ago
    I wonder if some kind of jammer is running in that area. Reminds me of a similar story: https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5672762/man-faces-48000-fine-for-driving-with-cellphone-jammer https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5672762/man-faces-48000-fi... Weird that even a wired connection does not work. Stay curious!
    • takinola 3y ago
      My first thought as well was there could be something emitting an intense signal in the vicinity that is interfering with the connection. However, there does not seem to be anything nearby (like I said, it is on a bridge going over a lake).
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • devilbunny 3y ago
        This isn’t your problem, but I had a 1994 Pontiac Bonneville whose trunk release signal was triggered by some kind of radio signal that was part of a reasonably common system (security? Anyway, this was late 90s). If I parked in certain locations (certain stores) my trunk was guaranteed to open. It was sometimes so bad that I would have to start the car, set the parking brake, shift to neutral (any gear other than park blocked the remote trunk release), close the trunk, and only then get back in, release the parking brake, and drive off. Otherwise I didn’t have enough time to start the car and get in gear before the trunk opened again. As a practical solution, I used a short bungee cord to keep it from opening far enough to be obvious, and never kept anything of value in the trunk if the car would be unattended.
• leononame 3y ago
  I enjoyed the story, but the writing I enjoyed even more. I really liked the tone and wittiness.
• 1024core 3y ago
  Reminds me of that old tale about a lady whose phone would not ring, and her dog would bark before the phone rang.
  • helph67 3y ago
    Just the basic facts... Climbing a nearby telephone pole and hooking in his test set, he dialed the subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring. He tried again. The dog barked loudly, followed by a ringing telephone. Climbing down from the pole then he found: a. Dog was tied to the telephone system's ground post via an iron chain and collar. b. Dog was receiving 90 volts of signalling current. c. After several jolts, the dog was urinating on ground and barking. d. Wet ground now conducted and phone rang. Which goes to prove that some grounding problems can be passed on.
    • 1024core 3y ago
      Thank you! I had forgotten the details.
• femto 3y ago
  From the article: > One such piece of magic new to 802.11n Wi-Fi is called "beamfoming" That's not quite true. 802.1ln has MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) processing, with "multiple" referring to the number of receiver and transmitter antennas. Beamforming is a special case of MIMO, and MIMO is a generalisation of beamforming. In a "Line-of-Sight" channel with no reflectors, MIMO converges to a beamforming solution. Capacity is then limited by the ability for the rx/tx array to resolve each antenna in the tx/rz array: the diffraction limit. In a "rich" channel, with reflectors, MIMO converges to a more complex solution, which takes advantage of the angular separation of the reflectors to resolve the individual rx/tx antennas, even if they are too close to each other to resolve with beamforming. Yes, counterintuitively MIMO capacity goes up as the channel become more complex/rich and less line-of-sight, whereas with just beamforming the capacity would typically go down. You can sort of think of MIMO as being beamforming where beams are bouncing off widely spaced reflectors, but even that doesn't do it justice. In reality, each "beam" is replaced with complex wavefront ("mode") which is matched to the environment and each mode is orthogonal to the other.
  • remram 3y ago
    "They said it does X but really it does X and the superset Y" In other words, they were correct then?
    • femto 3y ago
      They are describing a situation in which a line-of-sight channel is replaced with a rich/complex channel: the exact conditions under which MIMO distinguishes itself from beamforming. I'd say incomplete rather than incorrect, and the complete story is worth knowing as it makes the solution used more interesting.
      • obi1kenobi 3y ago
        (Author here.) Yeah, I get where you're coming from. Ultimately, this was an editing decision first and foremost. Beamforming is cool and magical, and MIMO even more so. The post wasn't intended as a primer on wireless technology, just as a fun read for folks to enjoy. I tried to sprinkle in some nerd-snipe-quality technical detail and offer links for folks who might want to dig in, and MIMO is explicitly discussed in both the 802.11n and in the several links on beamforming I provided. I barely managed to explain beamforming without that sidenote turning into a paragraph of its own. I don't think I could have done MIMO justice in a sidenote.
• zwieback 3y ago
  What kind of a tree is it?
  • obi1kenobi 3y ago
    (Author here) I'm not a tree expert, so ... a tall deciduous one? Sorry!
    • zwieback 3y ago
      Thanks, was wondering about the mechanics. Boughs with leaves would droop but needle trees not so much and would be more transmissive in the first place.
• jonathanlydall 3y ago
  When I started reading this it seemed like “internet” and WiFi were being conflated, for example on our neighbourhood WhatsApp group there are often people asking “Is anyone else’s WiFi down?”, when what they should ideally be asking is if anyone else’s (fibre) internet is down. In such cases I internally frown a little, but leave it there. Anyway, for the situation in this link, they actually have a WiFi bridge from their house to their office which has the connection to an ISP, so it is absolutely accurate to say the WiFi was down in this case.
  • obi1kenobi 3y ago
    (Author here) Yeah, my dad's company does this stuff for a living, so I learned to distinguish all the terminology very early on :)
• neon5077 3y ago
  Here's my own 500 mile email story. This happened to me about a year ago. Just a normal day at the office when suddenly the internet drops out, except for my machine. Everyone else has a network connection, but no internet. Except for me, I can't reach devices on the local network, but I can reach anything outside. Now, our network is not large or complicated. We have a consumer grade ONT and WiFi router provided by the ISP, and a big unmanaged ethernet switch. There's really nothing to go wrong here. After some debugging, I notice that I have been assigned an IP address in my ISP's public block. Tracert seemed to show no local network between me and the WAN. It was as if the router had somehow connected my WiFi client directly to the ONT, bypassing the local network. That only barely makes sense, but it was my best guess so I condemned the router. Next day, new router, same problem. I couldn't explain it. This time though, I didn't have an internet connection, but local network was reachable. Some sanity restored, ar least. Turns out that our fiber line had been accidentally cut during construction work. Once the ISP fixed that, all was normal. The question remains, how did I have internet connection through a severed fiber line? It's not likely that the router had a bizarre failure right before the line was cut. I suppose it's possible that Windows had sneakily connected me to some other WiFi network, but then why did I have a weird IP address? I have no explanations
  • jffhn 3y ago
    Here is mine. The admins could connect to their machines, but not to any user machine. It was winter and we had some heating issues, so I made a script "warmup_the_office.sh" that was meant to launch a "while(true){}" on each core of each PC of the office, but instead launched itself indefinitely on each and all reachable machines, exhausting all pids and preventing distant logging. We had to reboot everything by hand, after some nice warmup.
    • neon5077 3y ago
      What a gloriously dumb idea. If I had that sort of access, I'd probably try something similar, and probably get the same results. Did you admit what happened, or was there a "mysterious widespread network failure"?
• dgoldstein0 3y ago
  I was fully expecting the answer to be that the rain was tamping down some unknown source of wifi interference... Which is a reasonable hypothesis if the packet loss is also within the home network. I was not expecting the home Internet all went over a long range WiFi bridge, but knowing that a tree makes far more sense as the problem. Strange how it correlates with rain that way.
• ajmurmann 3y ago
  This reminds me of a taxi driver in Dubrovnik, Croatia who told me that his cel service would not work when it rained because the rain changed transmissions where he lived in a way that meant that his phone would connect to a cel tower one valley over which was in Bosnia where he didn't have a data plan.
  • seabass-labrax 3y ago
    Not for long! Once the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina becomes a member state of the European Union (a process which is seemingly progressing smoothly), it will be part of the European mobile phone 'roaming area' that is regulated as per PE/51/2018/REV/1. End result: your taxi driver's data plan will work whatever the weather :)
    • rvba 3y ago
      Will EU ever allow them in? With the problem of Hungary vetoing a lot (to help Russia) letting B&H in does not look smart. B&H comes with its own bag of problems too.
      • jcranmer 3y ago
        Of the European countries currently looking to join, Bosnia & Herzegovina will probably be the last one to actually make it. Which is pretty surprising considering that Kosovo has a is-this-actually-a-country dispute within the EU (which also blocks Serbia's accession), and Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine have not-so-minor problems of not being able to control portions of their territory thanks to Russian occupation. The Russo-Ukrainian war reignited a desire in the EU to actually enlarge towards the Balkans and Eastern Europe. But the countries that haven't joined aren't in great shape (the healthier bits of Yugoslavia joined earlier), and it's not clear to me that any of the current batch countries (especially Bosnia) will be able to join before such desires cool again.
        • ajmurmann 3y ago
          Bosnia Herzegovina is so tiny and has all the trouble that comes with the Republica Serbska and all the historical baggage of the region. From a poorly practical POV it honestly doesn't seem worth the trouble at all, especially given how EU decision making works
• singingfish 3y ago
  Back in the dialup days, my dialup would die, and be unable to re-connect at dusk. Other than that, it was fine, for dialup.
• gerdesj 3y ago
  Some years ago I put in a point to point wifi link for a family member, from house to garage "block". I specified a pair of Ubiquity Nanostations which are tiny, PoE powered and have a decent range. The house end is inside a UK standard tiled roof - dense 3/4", allow for slat, so 1"+ thick and dense material. The other end is 20m away (LoS) and external mounting was forbidden. The garage block has foil lined Kingspan style insulation. I managed to mount that end near enough to a skylight window to work OK. I then daisy-chained an access point off it. All was fine until the sky light was replaced with a metalicised one. The signal just about worked until it rained which was enough to nobble it. When it got annoying enough, me and said family member plotted and I rocked up when someone was absent for the weekend. I moved the garage station to the outside. It now looks like a bird box. I put up a real bird box at the other end too. The fake box would get baked in the sun but the real one is always shaded.
  • phyzome 3y ago
    Why was subterfuge required? Something is missing from this story.
    • gerdesj 3y ago
      Look up WAF! ... (Wife Acceptance Factor - far more important than Web App Firewall)
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • robocat 3y ago
      If you are renting then you might not be allowed to install an aerial on the building. There are situations where you need council permission to install an aerial or it may be forbidden e.g. listed historic buildings. Also see: https://www.townplanning.info/permitted-development/householder-permitted-development-pd-rights/satellite-dishes-aerials/ https://www.townplanning.info/permitted-development/househol... Just what I found doing a quick search.
      • 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• hughdbrown 3y ago
  I got this far: "The office and our apartment were a few blocks away from each other..." and figured it had to be a line of sight transmission. I encountered this in summer of 1993 when the company I worked at installed infrared (I think) transmission across our two offices, separated by 250m. When the summer sun swept behind the transmitter in the northwest-ish, the wifi went out for about an hour each evening.
• IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  >>> Maybe an antenna connector has corroded from spending years outdoors? Nope. Most people living in large metros will never fathom how wifi will simply stop working in the suburbs. It is easy to forget that Internet cables -normally hidden in cities- are completely exposed to elements in suburbs Lost wifi while at parent's ? Check the roof!
• anothernewdude 3y ago
  Here I thought it would be because it would be interfering with noise from other networks.
• thekevan 3y ago
  This is a bit ridiculous. How can you know that you have a ling of sight element to you network and not check that as the very first thing when you hear about rain effecting the wifi?
  • rvba 3y ago
    It sounds fake, especially as the solution would be to get the original equipment higher, instead of buying new equipment? Also why not lay a cable.
    • incompatible 3y ago
      It's just from some guy's office to his house, they aren't going to lay a cable across a few city blocks.
      • obi1kenobi 3y ago
        (Author here) Worse: to the balcony of our apartment building. Imagine asking your HOA how they'd feel about you mounting your antenna "higher" AKA on someone else's balcony or on the roof above someone else's apartment. "Just" move it higher vs replace ~10yr old (at the time) equipment with newer, faster equipment that doesn't have the problem? Easy answer if you ask me, and I'd make the same choice again with ~10yrs of retrospect -- the same 802.11n antennas are still there today!
    • Uehreka 3y ago
      > It sounds fake I don’t think so. I definitely know tech people who get a particular idea in their head and will debug it to hell and back before taking a step back and realizing the obvious thing they missed. I’ve definitely done it before myself. > Also why not lay a cable. It sounds like they were trying to run a network between two properties that weren’t adjacent. They may not have had permission from the neighbor in the middle to lay cable on their property, or it might’ve required laying a cable across a street.
      • 3y ago
• adammarples 3y ago
  The WiFi only works when it's raining (ps. one critical part of my WiFi setup is outdoors and depends on having a clear line of sight)
• jboogie77 3y ago
  Why does this sound like it was written by AI?
  • numpad0 3y ago
    Human writing with short context window can sound like AI too
    • obi1kenobi 3y ago
      (Author here) The image is AI generated. I did not use any AI to write the post itself. That's just my style of writing, you can check my pre-GPT posts and compare if you'd like.
• wildylion 3y ago
  One of the sysadmins at a friendly company had the same problem... only that it was a >2km link in a densely built-up city and it turned out to be a crane that moved in on rails each morning with the beginning of a shift and then moved out in the evening! Took a guy standing there with binoculars to realize what was going on...
• treme 3y ago
  I read about random bit flips but haven't read a good anecdote about it, if anyone can be so kind.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  TL;DR: A tree grew into the signal path. Rain weighed it down, bending it out of the way.
• koyote 3y ago
  One of my most recent 'weird internet issues' was when I upgraded our 50mbit internet connection to 100Mbit and my laptop never really reached 100Mbit whereas my homelab easily got 100Mbit on speed tests. It took me a while to realise the difference was that the homelab was physically connected and the laptop was using Wifi. The laptop wifi was connected to the AP at ~1.2 Gbit and a different machine had the same issue. I decided to see what the internal network speed was and found that sending/receiving files to the homelab from a wifi device was also maxing out at ~90mbit. This then steered me towards looking at the connection between the AP and the router, and I realised that the Wifi AP was connected at 100Mbit to the router instead of 1Gbit. Turned out the cheap CAT7 cable that I randomly used to connect Wifi to the router because it looked nicer than the existing cable was not actually a real CAT7 cable and only provided 100Mbit. Changing the cable fixed the issue! Out of paranoia I decided to replace all of my ethernet cables with decent quality ones. I don't even remember where that 'fake' cable came from; probably from some random Aliexpress appliance that I bought at some point. I've had similar issues with USB cables that I've amassed, where I forget where they came from and only realise later that they barely fulfil their purpose.
  • _nivlac_ 3y ago
    I'm getting confused reading your first sentence based on the rest of your comment; should homelab and laptop be swapped?
    • koyote 3y ago
      I don't think so (but I am a bit tired today, so maybe something I wrote makes no sense :)). Homelab is physically connected to the router whereas the laptop is connected via Wifi. It was the cable from the Wifi AP to the router that was dodgy which caused the issue. I noticed because the laptop would never reach 'true' 100Mbit download speeds whereas the homelab did.
  • tomaskafka 3y ago
    Dtto for video cables - once you get into 1440p/4k and high frequency rates or VBR, that HDMI 2.1 or DP 1.4 certifications start to actually matter. What is worse is that the hardware tries hard to make it work even with noncompliant cable resulting in things like random flashes of black, or multiple random reconnections after plugging in the laptop.
• seoulmetro 3y ago
  I hate how fake this sounds since it's a funny story. Trees leaves being weighed down by a slight drizzle? What tree does that? None around where I live. A tree blocking signals that strong as well? Doesn't make sense to me either.
• fuzztester 3y ago
  "Thunder only happens when it's raining" https://youtu.be/Y3ywicffOj4 https://youtu.be/Y3ywicffOj4 1:15
• thsksbd 3y ago
  Good read, but i was convinced as soon as i read the title that the rain was shielding the house from a near by transmitters that was blasting too much power.
• nunesvn 3y ago
  I don't know if this is fake, but it could be true. I had a similar situation working for a WISP around 2010. Every night, for about 10 minutes, the connections from our HQ to a relay tower became flaky. At the time we were using two Mikrotik 5GHz cards and some large antennas. You could sit in front your computer and wait, a few minutes after the sunset, for the monitoring alerts start arriving. After a week trying everything, including changing hardware (to the same specs), I was very disappointed with the thing and got out to smoke around the sunset. Then some huge lamps we had around the building switched on, based on a light sensor. Immediately I received the SMS alerts on my phone. I ran into the building, turned off the external lights and bingo: 0% packet loss. It turns out that the building management had changed all of external lamps the week before, with new sodium-vapor bulbs. And for some reason, on the first 5 to 10 minutes with these lights on, it caused very high interference on the 5GHz band. Changed the lamps, problem solved.
  • justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > And for some reason The ballast and the bulb itself are quite noisy in RF and then they are heating up they even more noisier.
  • cortesoft 3y ago
    I am just surprised that line of sight issues weren't the first thing checked when you have a bespoke line of sight networking setup, especially when there was no local packet loss.
    • heyoni 3y ago
      That whole article felt oddly empty. Like you could read the title and conclusion and be totally fine and satisfied.
• alhirzel 3y ago
  Reminds me of this story about repairing a large power line: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/
  • shmeeed 3y ago
    FYI, JWZ blocks linking from HN.
• wildylion 3y ago
  I also had another story: my friends asked me to troubleshoot their DSL connection. It dropped out sometime after the sun set and came back in the morning. Sure enough, this turned out to be RFI from newly installed solar invertors, creeping down the shield of an unused CB radio coax that ran parallel to the phone wiring. Grr, I hate DSL...
• askvictor 3y ago
  When it's extremely windy, our office Internet or Wifi speed slows down. Haven't worked out why yet. We have fibre to the building, so it's unlikely the uplink. But you never know.
  • srvmshr 3y ago
    It may not be the Wifi but something more upstream. If ISPs interlinks have microwave towers, then the physical swaying would have some effect on channel interference. I don't quite understand how (because the general direction remains the same over large distance) - but I have observed this to happen.
• asimpleusecase 3y ago
  We had an office in a very old building downtown with no access to fibre. The best internet we could get at the time was a 3G router in the window. Every afternoon at the same time our connection would drop down below 1 Meg and become unusable. Eventually we realised that down the street there was a large school and every afternoon when classes were over, hundreds of young people would turn in their phones and saturate our cell.
• chime 3y ago
  I had a similar experience about shipping pallet being fully loaded fixing server connectivity issues almost two decades ago: https://chir.ag/tech/?49 https://chir.ag/tech/?49
  • obi1kenobi 3y ago
    Oh wow, what a read! Great story, thanks for sharing :)
  • ummonk 3y ago
    That must have driven you crazy. The loop bit makes it so counterintuitive since interference from the pallet was actually helpful.
    • chime 3y ago
      Exactly. It was also my first real job as an IT manager, and I had just setup my first business wifi network for use with a shiny new Windows mobile scanner. So it definitely made me question if I was cut out for it. I left the company last year, having grown to 700+ employees in pharmaceutical manufacturing, a far-cry from my one-man IT department for 20 employees making shampoo. And while there were many, many weird issues over the years, none was ever so satisfying to resolve.
• ummonk 3y ago
  I feel like this story started off seeming way more mysterious than it actually was because it took so long to get to mentioning the crucial bit (the long distance WiFi bridge).
• miragecraft 3y ago
  This is how you know the WiFi is Garbage - only happy when it rains. At least you get a clue in this case (and the famous 500 miles email), I was having sporadic disconnections with cable internet for the last 2 month and my ISP can’t find anything wrong. Had to switch back to DSL and pay more for slower speed.
• redbell 3y ago
  > Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club: an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Honestly, reading "April 1st!", I was expecting this to be one of April's fools but it turned out to be a true and amusing story. The author was lucky to solve a technical problem in a non-technical way, unlike me! A decade ago, I had a weird Internet connection issue. The upload speed suddenly dropped to near zero kb/s while the download was alright. I contacted my ISP, and for weeks, they were unable to figure out what was going wrong. I reached out to my neighbor and offered him to pay his Internet bill in exchange for sharing his Wi-Fi with me until my ISP solves my problem, and he kindly agreed. After about three months, my ISP's technical staff was still unable to fix the issue. I gave up, and guess what I did to get around this?! I just moved away to another distant home.
• Jean-Philipe 3y ago
  Reminds me of that time when my desktop computer wouldn't turn on if the printer's USB was plugged in to the wrong kind of port. Took me some time to figure that one out. Or that other time, when my mom's phone started crashing all of a sudden. Until we discovered, that it was caused by her new ID card in the folding phone case touching the back of the phone.
• timkofu 3y ago
  This should have been a microwave link from the start.
• t_tsonev 3y ago
  Rain can improve signal quality by lowering the noise floor. Essentially, it drowns out the weaker signals originating from other emitters, making your own signal stand out.
• 2-3-7-43-1807 3y ago
  bit disappointed ... this is a very obscure set up and frankly speaking under those circumstances sth like "rain affects the wifi [either way]" is obviously not even close to magical thinking. definitely not worth almost 1000 upvotes.
• 9935c101ab17a66 3y ago
  The author’s completely over the top reaction to the plausible and not especially weird titular statement gets old, quick. Especially when they reveal that the network is using wifi antennas over a non-insignificant distance in an urban setting. Of course it’s the local wireless point to point bridge! The first thing you’d do is look down the line of sight for interference.
• nitin87 3y ago
  I thought it would be because waves travel longer distances on water.
• tomaskafka 3y ago
  Nice story! My guess was on either the water cooling an overheated device, or weight of water bending the roof on which the antenna is attached.
• atregir 3y ago
  Another fun story is the "My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla ice cream": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779857
• edpichler 3y ago
  Once I had an Internet cable that stopped for a while whenever I turned on the microwave (understandable), and also stopped when started raining. The trickiest part was that it turned off just for a while and ONLY at the beginning of the rain. I called the telecom company many times. They charge per visit in case no problem is found. I always had to explain the situation and ask the technician not to charge me and come when it started raining, a very hard thing to do because we cannot predict forecast and the network went down for 10 min only. It does not seem a big problem, after all, I could just wait 10 minutes. After this happened multiple times a day every rainy week, making me lose meetings, work, server connections, etc... I had to patiently chase the telecom company and even ask for the personal phone numbers of technicians (to ping them when it was going to rain) until they finally found a solution.
  • navigate8310 3y ago
    Don't leave it at the cliffhanger
    • edpichler 3y ago
      It was due to a pipe connected to the rain gutter in the house. At the beginning of the rain, the amount of water streaming through was hitting perfectly a joint in the internet cable. So it was happening only when the rain started, and stopping when the little stream got stronger and consequently jumping it and not hitting the cable joint anymore. It was discovered by the technician. He found it somewhere in the 100m of the cable coming out from the street pole, not an easy task.
• conqueso 3y ago
  As soon as it mentioned the line of site antennas I knew it had to be a tree. It often surprises me how much branches can sag from the weight of rainwater
• hmhrex 3y ago
  I will be adding this one to https://500mile.email https://500mile.email ! What a great story.
• zkett 3y ago
  I was expecting a story about frolicking about in the sun. I'll settle for a hardware troubleshooting adventure.
• Fnoord 3y ago
  I remember when I had ADSL2, I would get increased packet loss when it rained. After I failed to find the culprit, technicians from ISPs tried to debug it to no avail. It turned away when the connection got upgraded from ADSL2 to VDSL2.
• pettycashstash2 3y ago
  Once upon a time, I owned a 1998 Volkswagen Wolfsburg Edition, a sleek and vibrant red car that turned heads wherever I went. As a city worker, I found it convenient to park my car at the train station and commute to work. One particularly exhausting day, I trudged back from the train to the parking lot, eager to get home and unwind. As I approached my car, I noticed something peculiar—all the windows were missing. Panic gripped me, and I initially thought someone had vandalized my beloved vehicle. However, as I walked around the car, I couldn't find a single shard of glass on the ground. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the windows had simply been rolled down. Relief washed over me as I rolled them back up and drove home, putting the strange experience out of my mind. Weeks passed, and the incident faded from my memory. Then, on a lazy Saturday morning, I sat on my back porch, sipping a hot cup of coffee and enjoying the tranquility of the day. Suddenly, the sky darkened, and a light rain began to fall. As the raindrops pattered against the roof, I heard an unexpected sound—the distinct whirring of car windows rolling down. Perplexed, I set my coffee aside and hurried to the front of the house. To my astonishment, I found my Volkswagen's windows had mysteriously lowered themselves, allowing the rain to pour into the car's interior. It dawned on me that the windows' odd behavior must have been caused by a short circuit in the electrical system. From that day on, I knew my 1998 Volkswagen Wolfsburg Edition was more than just a cool, bright red car—it had a quirky personality of its own, keeping me on my toes with its unexpected window antics.
  • Slartie 3y ago
    Haha, I have a 2015 Opel Astra (I think they are sold as Vauxhall as well in some countries) and I noticed a similar thing one day: it suddenly had all windows lowered by itself, without me doing anything to cause it. The first time it happened was on a music festival after hauling a lot of camping gear from the car. I locked it using the remote key fob, put the keys into my pocket and hauled the last bunch of stuff to our camp. An hour or so later someone told me that my car had completely open windows, asking whether that was intentional. Of course it wasn't. The next time it happened was at home, after shopping for groceries. I locked the doors, carried the box with the groceries into my flat, and when I finished unpacking them I looked out of the window and saw my car in the parking lot - with fully lowered windows. I thought it was a glitch in the firmware or whatever. A few days later the same thing happened again - I shopped groceries, carried them in, looked out of the window - car had lowered the windows entirely by itself. The same glitch twice within a few days? In almost the same situation? How big are the chances for that? Then it suddenly dawned on me. I have quite a lot of stuff in my pockets. Including the car key with the remote buttons. Whenever carrying heavy stuff, boxes and such, there is quite a good chance of me accidentally pressing the "unlock" button not shortly, but for a few seconds. So I took my key fob, stood in front of the car, held down the button...and after five seconds of waiting, all of the windows lowered for just a little bit, and after waiting a few additional seconds they lowered completely. Since then I know about an interesting feature of my car: it can remotely lower the windows for ventilation in summer.
• hellweaver666 3y ago
  This reminds me of when I used to work for an ISP. Every November the "my internet doesn't work when we turn on the Christmas tree" calls would start. It was usually interference from cheap tree lights, but occasionally it was people unplugging the router to plug in their Christmas tree :D
• dkarl 3y ago
  Weighing down the leaves is one possibility, but is it also possible that water adhering to surfaces was creating reflections and providing alternative paths for the signal? I don't know if such a thing could happen at that frequency, but if you imagine looking out a window at night towards a window in a distant building, with a tree blocking the direct line of sight, and someone in the window sending you a message with a flashlight, you would only see the light via reflections. On a dry night the reflections might be matte and hard to see, but on a rain-soaked night you might be able to see stronger and sharper reflections on metal poles, walls, or puddles that were visible from both windows.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  Issue: rain caused tree branch to go lower unobscured wifi
• rft 3y ago
  To add another weird tech issue to this collection: The camera shy Raspberry Pi. A model of the RPi would reboot when photographed with a flash: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31294745 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31294745 (2015)
• MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  I feel like the first step would be looking at the antenna since you’re using a weird antenna connection to a different buildint
• p0w3n3d 3y ago
  One winter had been so cold I had cartoon network and other cable stations available on my terrestrial antenna. When the frozen temperatures finished, I had to buy cable because I got used to it