[HN Gopher] The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
___________________________________________________________________
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
Author : bonyt
Score : 482 points
Date : 2024-04-01 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (predr.ag)
(TXT) w3m dump (predr.ag)
| I-M-S wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _the organizers of April Cools._
|
| The org name _April Tools_ was right there!
| festive-minsky wrote:
| Sorry, but why would 'April Tools' be better?
| pvg wrote:
| I'm not following, better than what?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This was my thinking. Or some other poorly seated electrical
| connection that somehow got better when it was damp.
| brazzy wrote:
| My guess was that water accumulates somewhere and bends the
| antenna out of alignment.
| user_7832 wrote:
| 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
|
| (Side note, is this story old? 802.11n isn't particularly new
| enough to upgrade to.)
| avianlyric wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| progbits wrote:
| > Side note, is this story old?
|
| FTA:
|
| > At the time, I was still a college student -- this was over
| 10 years ago.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/f7g1sa/gas_l
| i...
| lights0123 wrote:
| https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-
| that-...
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/09/office_chair_emissio
| n...
| hobs wrote:
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| My Mac Pro desktop used to wake up whenever I used a MacBook
| Pro in the same room. Obvious thought was, maybe the laptop
| was sending wake-on-lan packets for some reason. Turns out,
| the carpeting in that room tends to create static buildup,
| and my MBP's charger was not grounded. Touching the laptop
| would send a mild discharge into the wall line, tripping
| something in the desktop's PSU to wake it up.
| treflop wrote:
| I couldn't use my apartment complex's laundry machine if I was
| still connected to my own Wi-Fi (and using it).
|
| It would interfere with the Bluetooth signal.
| progbits wrote:
| Same, my macbook had unusable wifi when playing music via
| Bluetooth headphones. Switched to playing from my phone,
| somehow that worked - probably problem with the BT radio in the
| laptop since I didn't change wifi channel.
| bonton89 wrote:
| Aren't bluetooth and wifi typically on the same module these
| days?
|
| The worst interference problem I've heard of is how USB 3.0
| uses 2.4ghz and therefore can cause problems with devices
| connected with it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It causes a big smear of interference but one of the higher
| regions is inside the 2.4GHz band.
| maxglute wrote:
| I have a fancy microwave that degrades my fancy bluetooth
| headset but not others. Did replacing the wifi card work? I'm
| wondering if I need to switch up my expensive microwave, or
| expensive headphone, because replacing bluetooth dongle (with
| another generic one with same chipset) hasn't resolved issue.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "Close the window you're letting all the WiFi out"
| bombcar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| xyzelement wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| Or the Magic/More Magic switch
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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
| ortusdux wrote:
| If we are doing classic stories - Grace Hooper and the
| Nanosecond of wire
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw
|
| https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_692464
| amelius wrote:
| I came here to see if someone posted that.
| tiltowait wrote:
| I forgot all about the 500 miles story. My favorite line:
|
| > If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human
| recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken
| down in tears.
| lamontcg wrote:
| and previously discussed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708
| asadhaider wrote:
| First thing I thought of too. Anyone know if there a list of
| more articles similar to these three?
| barryrandall wrote:
| DNS responses sent over UDP are often truncated if the
| response is too large. This manifests itself as "machine
| unreachable if name > x characters" sort of errors when you
| have really long FQDNs.
| Tomte wrote:
| My wife has complained that open office will never print on
| Tuesdays!?
|
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161.
| ..
| fabatka wrote:
| I remember one (might have been a hn-er's comment, dunno)
| about the computer restarting when the toilet was flushed.
| Turns out it was due to voltage drop when a compressor turned
| on to refill the reservoir of the toilet.
| cyberax wrote:
| My personal example: VoIP phones stopping after the Asterisk
| server was up for 3 days.
|
| Reason: the server had IPv6 turned on, and it steadily
| accumulated privacy IPv6 addresses. These addresses were all
| sent in a packet describing the supported media endpoints,
| using UDP.
|
| And yep, eventually it overflowed the MTU and the phones
| couldn't handle the fragment reassembly.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Which distro was that? ... asking for a friend ...
| cyberax wrote:
| Just regular Ubuntu. It was around 2009 or so.
| mikegreenberg wrote:
| I have one first-hand story:
|
| I did tech support via phone for a popular consumer computer
| brand. One particular call, a woman reported that her
| computer was restarting every time someone in the house
| flushed the toilet.
|
| Long story short, her home was in the back-back woods with
| the home powered by a generator. In addition to powering the
| computer, the generator was also the source of power for a
| water pump which would kick on to refill the toilet bowl
| whenever it emptied. And wouldn't you know that that water
| pump had a beefy coil around its motor and would brownout the
| entire house every time it started?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Here's one attempt I've seen in other HN comments at a shared
| "awesome list" of these sorts of stories:
|
| https://github.com/danluu/debugging-stories
| DonHopkins wrote:
| A user was having a really bizarre problem: They could log in
| when they were sitting down in a seat in front of the
| keyboard, but when they were standing in front of the
| keyboard, their password didn't work! The problem happened
| every time, so they called for support, who finally figured
| it out after watching them demonstrate the problem many
| times:
|
| It turned out that some joker had rearranged the numbers keys
| on the keyboard, so they were ordered "0123456789" instead of
| "1234567890". And the user's password had a digit in it. When
| the user was sitting down comfortably in front of the
| keyboard, they looked at the screen while they touch-typed
| their password, and were able to log in. But when they were
| standing in front of the computer, they looked at the
| keyboard and pressed the numbers they saw, which were wrong!
| RandallBrown wrote:
| The Daily WTF is full of them.
|
| https://thedailywtf.com
| wrboyce wrote:
| https://500mile.email although I do wish it had more content!
| zerd wrote:
| The podcast that kills the car stereo episode of Reply All is
| pretty funny https://gimletmedia.com/amp/shows/reply-
| all/brh8jm
| sebtron wrote:
| Or the "Car allergic to vanilla ice cream" story [1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37584399
| duxup wrote:
| I had a customer who used a line of sight system for extending
| their network across part of a city.
|
| I had a shortcut on my desktop with the weather for that town
| ready when they would inevitably call and blame our unrelated
| equipment for some problem.
| scbrg wrote:
| I worked at a small, local ISP in the 90:ies that had a point
| to point link across the river, handling the dial up traffic
| from the telecom company we partnered with.
|
| Every few days, always at roughly the same time, all incoming
| dial up traffic would drop. A minute later, the customers
| could reconnect.
|
| It took a while before we realized that one of the huge
| passenger ferries that docked a short distance upstream was
| the cause. When it arrived and departed, its chimneys and
| possibly bridge and highest deck blocked LOS across the
| river.
| dmurray wrote:
| I used to work in high-frequency trading. I had several tabs
| permanently open to the live weather radar feed for regions
| where we had microwave towers: the NE USA, the South of
| England, the Alps...
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I'm curious to know where your towers were. Do you know if
| they still exist? Were your microwave antennae co-located
| on other operators' towers (e.g. those for VHF radio), or
| did your company have towers all to itself?
| dmurray wrote:
| Without going into anything confidential - we had some of
| our own hardware, but generally rented capacity from
| firms like [0]. Some towers were custom built for HFT,
| some were shared with other types of users.
|
| A famous blog post investigating some of the towers as an
| outsider, at [1], will be of interest to you.
|
| If you want to guess where they are, get a globe, find
| the datacentres where electronic exchanges operate (it's
| not a secret: Chicago, New Jersey, London, Frankfurt,
| Zurich...) and draw the straightest possible lines
| between pairs of them. Microwaves don't cross the ocean.
|
| [0] https://www.mckay-brothers.com/
|
| [1] https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/hft-
| in-my-ba...
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Boy did that [0] send me down a long rabbit hole
|
| [0] magic-story
| vikingerik wrote:
| My recent version: I was playing a pinball game in an arcade.
| One particular ramp shot was registering earlier in the day and
| then stopped working.
|
| Eventually I realized that the sensor is an optical beam, and
| the receiver happened to be in direct sunlight coming in
| through a window! So it was continuously receiving infrared and
| would never report the beam being blocked by a pinball. Sure
| enough, it started working again once the sun angle changed by
| a few more degrees.
| freedomben wrote:
| Oh man, this is one of my favorite lines of all time:
|
| > "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into
| it--"
|
| > "Geostatisticians..."
|
| > "--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within
| which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles.
| There are a number of destinations within that radius that we
| can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never
| email farther than this radius."
|
| I adore when experts use their expertise to analyze real-world
| things like this and provide ridiculously thorough explanations
| :-D
| fsckboy wrote:
| it's a useful analysis. Nobody thought of router hops, but
| this pattern is pretty much what you'd expect, so it was a
| very good hint.
| neilv wrote:
| My favorite story kinda of this nature, of an expert as alien
| intelligence, was Feynmann's calculations about computer
| architecture of the Connection Machine:
|
| https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-
| machin...
|
| It's a few paragraphs, maybe too much to quote, but the bulk
| of it starts with:
|
| > _By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed
| his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our
| surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form
| of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist
| this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a
| set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable
| system is a bit strange. [...] Our discrete analysis said we
| needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman 's equations suggested
| that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and
| ignore Feynman._
|
| Guess who was right.
|
| The whole essay is worth reading, if you haven't yet.
| sspiff wrote:
| As someone with very limited electrical experience, the more
| magic switch story instantly went "the second terminal of the
| switch is probably grounded to the switch casing" when they
| explained it only had one connected terminal.
|
| This is a very common thing in older automotive electronics,
| for example.
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| Magic/more magic legend lives! I tell that to everyone
| experiencing a spooky troubleshooting!
| neilv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Well, that would have meant interacting with other people...
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| can't really be that entitled and ask them to cut their tree
| (or even if you do it by youself)
| obi1kenobi wrote:
| (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 wrote:
| 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.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Sounds like it would be a neat excuse to get the children to go
| out when it's sunny!
| mart2d2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You don't think it's unusual to find a positive correlation
| where there is usually a negative correlation?
| tantalor wrote:
| Unusual yes, magical no
| rconti wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This was my first thought too. Tree makes more sense.
| mywacaday wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelMug wrote:
| 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
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me. Optical mice don't like transparent or
| some translucent surfaces.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Offtopic.
|
| Not sure how you're styling your links, but in a dark mode view,
| they are effectively illegible.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/aSbpVF8
| ColinWright wrote:
| 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/3v52p...
| re wrote:
| 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
|
| [Edit: I see this one has also been mentioned a few times
| already in the thread]
| Biganon wrote:
| 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
| drb999 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Well, you can't just ignore a radar shadow or noise. Just
| like GP's point-to-point microwave link couldn't just
| "ignore" the crane. You can't make a bad Wi-fi connection
| faster by just telling your computer to ignore the wall
| between you and the hot spot. A wind turbine is a solid
| obstacle that conceals stuff behind it, and even if a
| single turbine might not be a big deal, most commonly
| someone interested in harnessing wind power would want to
| build an entire farm, which would be much worse.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| At that point, I'd have called a bush pilot to fly along the
| lines!
| nate wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| EMI maybe? Certain chairs cause monitors to go blank for a few
| seconds.
|
| https://mastodon.social/@haeckerfelix/110272427676278609
| duffyjp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| konstantinua00 wrote:
| just to dispell my paranoia: are you sure there aren't any
| cables under the floorboards there?
| stanleykm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Reminds me of a song by Fleetwood Mac. _Wifi only woooorks when
| it 's raaaaining ..._
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's what I thought this article would be about before I read
| it. I've observed the same thing before.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| car clutches and brakes famously act/sound different in the
| wet, maybe a clutch or friction material somewhere acting
| differently?
| mulmen wrote:
| ABS?
| duffyjp wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| yeah, maybe that's it :-/
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That would be ironic on your wedding day.
| hbn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Want a cookie for that? It's not a competition, just enjoy the
| writeup.
|
| Goddamn I'm sick of these sorts of comments
| keybored wrote:
| There's troubleshooting and then there's the troubleshooting
| of the troubleshooting post-mortem. GP is just doing the
| latter.
| jeppebemad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| fwiw I don't think you overreacted. It's not like
| anyone's making hbn read this story. it's like
| complaining about the movie Titanic, that because we know
| the boat sinks, its not worth watching.
|
| the alternate version of this post goes "I fixed my dad's
| Internet. The neighborhood's tree grew too tall and
| blocked the signal so I upgraded the 10 year old
| hardware. The end." How much less fun and interesting is
| that?
| hbn wrote:
| I'm not bragging, I'm just saying if you have one custom,
| specialized part in your setup that's particularly out of the
| ordinary and prone to failure, I'm surprised you wouldn't
| start there.
|
| If you're e.g. running a piece of software with a crazy
| custom plugin that overhauls major functionality and then an
| update to the base software breaks everything, it shouldn't
| be TOO much of a mystery on where to start looking. When you
| add weird custom parts to a system, it tends to be a point of
| failure.
|
| Perhaps the author just didn't remember that they had a
| custom setup like that, but it wasn't framed in the article
| like "suddenly I remembered...", it was just stated as a
| given. And the fact that it was giving them particularly high
| speed home internet access for the time, it'd be a kind hard
| thing to forget?
| obi1kenobi wrote:
| (Author here) I didn't forget, it just didn't seem like the
| most likely problem.
|
| Like I said in a reply to a sibling to your comment, the
| gear was ~10yrs old at the time and had been working fine
| until then. It was perched in a very inconvenient spot
| because it had to "look around the corner" of the building,
| so checking the line of sight wasn't just a case of looking
| out the window.
|
| I went in order of "most likely to be the problem, weighted
| by how easy they were to check." This is a debugging
| strategy that has served me well, and I don't regret using
| it that time either.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I don't object to your order of debugging, but it was
| confusing to get that far in before realizing what "wifi"
| really meant in this situation.
| OJFord wrote:
| But rain is more obviously _related_ ^ to a point to
| point link than aging hardware or some kind of bad
| update?
|
| (^though of course the _improvement_ is surprising! I
| assumed there was antennae involved, whether point to
| point or LTE or whatever, just from the title. The story
| to me was from the outset why 's it better not worse in
| rain.)
| dhosek wrote:
| Yes, it's not a competition, but if you have a line of sight
| network connection and the network only works when it's
| raining, the obvious thing to check is that line of sight.
| obi1kenobi wrote:
| (Author here)
|
| I didn't think to check the line of sight because I was
| primed by the fact the bridge had been running fine for 10
| years. With networking gear that old, it seemed more likely
| that a device/cable/power brick had just gone bad with age.
|
| Also, the antenna is on some metal scaffolding propped out
| 6ft past the edge of our balcony, because it needs to "look
| around the corner" of the building. It's 30ft in the air,
| and checking the line of sight involved climbing up there.
| It certainly wasn't the easiest nor the likeliest thing to
| check, so I didn't check it first.
|
| Multiple people in the comments just here on HN have
| mentioned having weird situations caused by routers that
| had gone bad. I imagine most of their routers weren't 10
| years old when they started acting up. How old is your
| router?
| jonhohle wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fair point. I suppose it's very much device dependant. The
| P2P stuff I've used was good for a few km.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Free space path loss over 5 meters with non-directional
| antennas is the same as over 500 meters with 20 dB of gain
| at each end.
| obi1kenobi wrote:
| No antenna is directional enough to overcome n^2 scaling.
| Especially not the mid-tier consumer-grade hardware I would
| have had access to at the time.
|
| Rough rule of thumb, a consumer-grade directional antenna
| (at least at the time, maybe they've improved in the last
| 10yrs) will give your signal strength a one-digit
| multiplier (say ~8x), meaning ~7-10dB. But that n^2 means
| that improvement only takes you 2-3x farther, not 8x.
|
| Here we're talking about ~100x the distance, which would
| need a 10000x = 40dB improvement in signal strength. AFAIK
| an antenna like that would cost more than the entire city
| block where I grew up
| londons_explore wrote:
| Wifi normally uses adaptive transmit power and data rates. If
| the signal gets a bit weaker, your link slows down from say 300
| Mbps to 260 Mbps. No biggie.
|
| But sometimes for direct links you set the modulation, power
| and data rate fixed. The end result is that changing channel
| conditions can turn the link from 'working perfectly' to 'not
| working at all'
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Keep in mind this was a 802.11g network.
| takinola wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-fi...
|
| Weird that even a wired connection does not work. Stay curious!
| takinola wrote:
| 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).
| leononame wrote:
| I enjoyed the story, but the writing I enjoyed even more. I
| really liked the tone and wittiness.
| 1024core wrote:
| Reminds me of that old tale about a lady whose phone would not
| ring, and her dog would bark before the phone rang.
| helph67 wrote:
| 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.
| femto wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "They said it does X but really it does X and the superset Y"
|
| In other words, they were correct then?
| femto wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| (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 wrote:
| What kind of a tree is it?
| obi1kenobi wrote:
| (Author here) I'm not a tree expert, so ... a tall deciduous
| one? Sorry!
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| (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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Does your machine have a cellular modem that gets prioritized
| only when there's no route to some well-known service via the
| normal network adapter? And you disabled it (but forgot to
| mention doing so in this story) around the same time as
| swapping routers?
| valzam wrote:
| My Wifi doesn't work properly when it's raining, can be combine
| forces?
| obi1kenobi wrote:
| (Author here) I'm worried they might combine in a way that
| leaves them not working neither rain nor shine!
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :)
| singingfish wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why was subterfuge required? Something is missing from this
| story.
| hughdbrown wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >>> 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 wrote:
| Here I thought it would be because it would be interfering with
| noise from other networks.
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