Subj : Re: More on wifi range - Pi PICO W Oil level sensor
To   : All
From : c186282
Date : Wed Dec 10 2025 15:00:01

On 12/9/25 06:57, Andy Burns wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> 
>> might be dependent on where I parked the car
> 
> Monitoring within the appliance bays of multiple fire stations, 
> certainly shows signal levels exhibiting high and low levels depending 
> whether the truck is in or out ...

   Wi-Fi is sometimes just black magic ...

   Simply just moving things just a couple of
   inches oft makes an unreasonable difference.

   2.4 tends to have better range indoors
   than 5ghz - making up for the lower xfer
   rate by being Reliable.

   5G phone can be just as spooky.

   6G phone ... I saw somewhere that a theoretical
   'dynamic signal steering' tech might help - but
   real-world that's still to be seen.

   Robots ... with current tech they will depend on
   being able to connect their tiny AIs to a BIG AI
   somewhere else so they can do much more. BUT, if
   6G is horrible, then what ?

   If monitoring 'emergency vehicles/installations'
   is critical, maybe consider something using lower
   frequencies than wi-fi ??? In USA I think there's
   a designated comm space in the 400mhz band. It'd
   still be good enough for a 1-fps camera feed.

   Ah ... POTENTIAL cheap solution. Haven't fooled
   with it in about 10 years but I think it's still
   possible with Linux. Just buy one of those wi-fi
   extender/repeater thingies (about $50 USD) and
   put it not far from the main router. Make it
   wlan1. At least with wpasupplicant and dhcpcd.conf
   you could designate an automatic "fall over" in
   case the main signal got crappy. Not 100% sure
   what happens now with apps if you list a wlan0 and
   wlan1 at the same time - will the app just use
   whichever, or both, without complaints ???

   Between the two, 'shadow' areas ought to largely
   go away.

   Pity nobody makes a 5ghz "viewer" so you can
   get at least a fuzzy picture of the signal at
   different places  :-)

   I have a repeater to reach an out-building. Gonna
   try to add it as wlan1 just to see what happens ...









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