The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)

Oh, wow. This sort of happened in my life!

My grandmother's house is adjacent my parents' w/ 200 ft. between and line of sight. Back in 2013, when my grandmother moved into the then-new house, I setup a point-to-point wifi bridge between them to share my parents' Internet connection and give me easy remote support access to grandma.

Summer of 2023 visiting relatives complained the Internet service in grandma's house was slow and unreliable. There were repeated suggestions made by helpful relatives for purchasing a new WiFi router for her house, getting independent Internet service, etc.

Grandma was happy with it, and the relatives went home, so I put off looking at it. When I did finally look at it, months later (when I went over for Thanksgiving) everything seemed fine.

When the relatives came to visit in summer 2024 they complained again. I looked at it immediately and found massive packet loss on both ends.

The ornamental trees planted along the driveway between the houses were the culprit. With the leaves off (say, at Thanksgiving time) it was fine. When the relatives came to visit in the summer the trees were in full leaf and acting as very good attenuators.

The trees were newly planted when grandma moved in. I didn't even think about them getting bigger and fuller when I set up the link. They filled out in the 10 years intervening, though. (Chalk it up to me still being relatively young and not thinking about installations on 10+ year timescales when I put it up.)

Fortunately there's a room in her house with line of sight to my parents' house unobscured by trees. It meant putting the radio outside a bedroom window instead of the attic (where I'd originally stashed it), but it solved the problem and ended complaints from relatives.

I've collected a list of fun stories of this form and post them when this comes up:

- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt

- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

This reminds me of the printer that never prints on Tuesdays.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010

I once moved into a new apartment, built a new PC, but noticed that every 30 or so minutes while gaming my monitor would turn off. It was just frequent enough to make gaming intolerable. One day I was plugging something in and moved my DisplayPort cable slightly and my monitor turned off again. Turns out it was too close to the antennas for the WiFi card I had; it was inducing a current in the DisplayPort cable and the monitor’s firmware didn’t know what to do so it just crashed! I moved the cable slightly further away and it never happened again.

Long time ago I had a 10km 2.4ghz wifi link with directional antennas, it worked very well but the throughtput improved with rain.

Directional antenas are far from directional, they pick noise from everywhere.

In my opinion rain reduces that noise, and if the point to point has more than enough signal margin to keep operating at full speed, it ends up improving the link.

Something like horse blinders.

On two separate instances 4 years apart in Liberia, the VSAT unit and Asus WiFi router were overheating at peak usage or peak heat times. This must be happening more than is generally realized.

Easiest solution: permanently point a good case-fan-sized USB fan on to the unit, using its own USB port.

I was fully prepared for the wet walls of the building to act as a reflector.

I'm surprised WiFi can't pass on reliably through branches. Must have been a nightmare back then.

Reminds me of an old joke:

https://youtu.be/ub0Nl4HPFGA

I expected this

The fix was easy: Prune the branches. than

>The fix was easy: upgrade our hardware. We replaced our old 802.11g devices with new 802.11n ones, which took advantage of new magic math and physics to make signals more resistant to interference.

(2024)

Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371

Related:

We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805665