New World Record for Wi-Fi Distance: 125 Miles
Posted by Mike on Saturday, July 30th, 2005 @ 09:35 pm [News]
My pal Frank Keeney tells me that the world record holders for the longest distance for an unamplified Wi-Fi link (55.1 miles at 30mw) blasted through their own year old record today at the Defcon Wi-Fi Shootout. Team PAD shot their signal a distance of 125 miles from outside Las Vegas, Nevada to a location near St. George, Utah, winning them a new record in the "unamplified" category at the shootout. This possibly qualifies them for a new Guiness record as well.
Frank is the founder of wlanparts.com that provided the Wi-Fi gear to Team PAD. He tells me they used the VCom 325hp+ PCMCIA cards running at a built-in power of 300 mw on each end of the link. The cards were connected to one 12 foot and one 10 foot diameter satellite dish (see photo) on each side of the link. The computers they used were running Linux. And their link quality was so fantastic that they got 12 ms ping times, ran ssh shell commands, and even used vnc remote desktop.

He also said that Team PAD may use the same gear to attempt smashing our old Bluetooth record of 1.08 miles.

Team photo and my estimated link locations follow. I'll post more as pics and video become available. Congrats guys! Maybe Wired will make an annual comic strip in your honor.





So, they have an annual event called the DefCon WiFi Shootout where they compete in events such as shooting a WiFi signal as far as possible, and races where they compete to see who can hack secured networks the quickest.



Awesome.

WiFi signals should be banned. What is to keep a kid from shooting one of these off while their parents are not at home? 125 miles is ridiculous. Nobody needs that sort of firepower.

I want one of thos WiFi guns. Imagine what you could do with it!