Subj : Re: More on wifi range - Pi PICO W Oil level sensor
To   : All
From : Carlos E.R.
Date : Thu Dec 11 2025 22:18:22

On 2025-12-09 11:47, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> First of all thanks to all those who responded on my first efforts to 
> put a battery power Pi Pico W outside and have it phone home.
> 
> Having eliminated temperature and supply voltage as issues, I delved 
> into wifi and router logs, and it was clear that it was sometimes 
> getting a DHCP lease and even occasionally opening a TCP/IP connections 
> and sending data. And might be dependent on where I parked the car and 
> the weather.
> 
> I tried putting a tin tray behind the router and that made it worse.
> 
> Now the layout was that a ground floor router through the window and the 
> garage was not very good at about 30m range.
> 
> Then I remembered I had put an Ethernet port in an upstairs bedroom by 
> the window in case I wanted to use it as an office.
> 
> It was further away - 35m or so - but much less cluttered path. It just 
> had to go through a corner of the garage.
> 
> Instantly the router reported about 8-10dB more signal and almost 
> reliable comms resulted.

Two ideas.

Some routers can steer the signal horizontally; the technology is called 
"MIMO" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO). You notice because the 
router has multiple antenas, maybe four.

Then you can replace the antena on the router or the remote with a 
directional WiFi antena. Home made with a box of Pringles. just google 
for "pringles wifi antenna". I made one and it actually works. But maybe 
they are sold, too.

....

> And I knew all that trig would come in handy one day :-)

You can calculate it numerically on a computer, by calculating the 
aproximate integral ;-)

-- 
Cheers, Carlos.
ES??, EU??;

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.2
 * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

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