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I have been very interested in 802.11ah halow (wifi in 900mhz ism band) to solve the inconvenient distances where 2.4g wifi has insufficient range, but something like a LTE catM modem is overkill. I'd be very disappointed if this effectively takes over the band nationwide.

Can anyone comment on nextnav's intended duty cycle or just how much they'll occupy? They're asking for a lot of bandwidth, so perhaps it's in a short enough burst and infrequent enough to not cause real problems?



> Can anyone comment on nextnav's intended duty cycle or just how much they'll occupy? They're asking for a lot of bandwidth, so perhaps it's in a short enough burst and infrequent enough to not cause real problems?

According to the FCC doc nextnav plans on "making excess spectrum available for commercial broadband service" (LTE/5G or similar I assume). So, it could be pretty impactful to current users of the band.


> 2.4g wifi has insufficient range

Is this about propagation over obstructed Fresnel zone paths?

I ask because generally 2.4GHz has much longer range than 900MHz due to the much higher gain antennas achievable at higher frequencies.

But if there's something in the way (trees, buildings, a bit of terrain), then 900MHz can work on a path when 2.4GHz doesn't. I suppose that's one definition of "has sufficient range".


Yes, forest is my exact use case, with roving devices that are too cheap to have phased arrays so get stuck on low gain antennas.


How would these roving devices even use a phase array? They are moving. Sounds like you dont want directional coverage and just need repeaters


Have you found 802.11ah hardware? I'm also interested in it but haven't found hardware to play with.


I've been experimenting with the ALFA HaLow HAT [1] for some personal projects. There's also a number of APs good for point-to-point use.

[1] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19956




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