Gargoyle Forum

I'm looking at the MCS table found here https://wlanprofessionals.com/mcs-table ... to-use-it/ and noting that range is greatest at a MCS index of 0. I'm on a 250 acre farm with sensors spread all over, and trying to figure out how to get sensor info back to my central server (up to 900m, usually within 400m). I'm looking at DIY directional antennas, but also wanted to see if it's possible to manually drop the MCS index to 0 or 1 on the router side so range is maximized. Don't need much throughput for the sensors to send and receive their data.

I don't believe so. You can try setting basic and supported rates and disabling 802.11n?
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/basic

Remember that a directional antenna at one end won't help. If you and I were at opposite ends of a football field and only one of us had a megaphone, we could only effectively have 1 way communication.

Lantis wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 17, 2021 5:07 pm

Remember that a directional antenna at one end won't help. If you and I were at opposite ends of a football field and only one of us had a megaphone, we could only effectively have 1 way communication.

A directional antenna at one end of a radio link with an omnidirectional antenna at the other works fine provided that each antenna is used for both transmit and receive so the gain is used in both directions, which is different from the megaphone analogy where gain is used for transmit only.

In fact most radio systems other than fixed point-to-point links have different antennas at each end. An extreme example of antenna performance asymmetry: Voyager space craft talking to NASA's DSN 70m dishes...