In the first article of this series, we covered how the AyrMesh HubDuo can be used to provide a relatively dense, continuous “cloud” of WiFi over a relatively small area (hundreds to low thousands of acres). In the second article in this series, we covered how to use the AyrMesh Hub2 series (the AyrMesh Hub2x2 and Hub2T) to create a “sparse” mesh across a huge area – many thousands of acres.
Dense Mesh
However, you don’t have to choose one or the other. The AyrMesh HubDuo has a “Hybrid mode” that allows it to create a “close in” mesh between nearby HubDuo units for a relatively “dense” mesh and a mesh with distant Hub2 Units for a “sparse” mesh across your fields.
The way it does this is that it uses the 5.8 GHz. radio for the “close,” dense mesh and the 2.4 GHz. radio for the farther “sparse” mesh. The Gateway Hub has to be an AyrMesh HubDuo, because the Gateway turns the meshing for both radios on. The Remote HubDuos only have the 5.8 GHz. mesh radio on (they still have WiFi on both bands) and the Hub2 units further away, of course, only use 2.4 GHz.
Sparse Mesh
This gives you the option of starting with one option and later including the other – you’re not “trapped” with either. Even if you start with a “sparse” mesh using a Hub2 as your Gateway Hub, you can replace it with a HubDuo, expand the “close” network using additional HubDuos, and use the Hub2 as a Remote elsewhere on the farm. Any Hub can serve either role.
Hybrid Mesh – Dense Mesh near the Gateway, Sparse Mesh Further Away
The AyrMesh WiFi Mesh is flexible and modular, designed to provide you with a way to cover the ground you need with strong, reliable WiFi. Once you have the network for one purpose, whether it’s to provide WiFi in your farmyard or across your fields, you may discover just how handy it is in other places. The modularity of AyrMesh allows you to quickly and easily extend your network as needed.
Please let us know in the comments what you think about this – are we on the right track, or are there other things you’d like to see? What benefits have you seen from extending your network? What has kept you from expanding your AyrMesh network further?
On the last blog post, we showed how meshing can expand continuous WiFi coverage across a large area – up to hundreds of acres – using the AyrMesh HubDuo.
We recommend using no more than three “hops” over Hubs across your network to maintain good bandwidth (speed). To maintain consistent continuous coverage for a smartphone, the Hubs should be positioned about half a mile apart. The usual way to think about the network is as a set of concentric “rings” around the Gateway Hub, so, in this case, the last ring of Hubs are only a mile and a half from the center. With the coverage extending an additional quarter of a mile from the outer Hubs, that would provide a circle of WiFi out 1.75 miles from the Gateway Hub (3.5 miles across).
Three “rings” of AyrMesh Hubs
Calculating the area, we find that “maximal ring” of Hubs covers 9.6 square miles, or over 6,000 acres – an impressive area! However, of course, your Internet source is not always in the center of the property, and you may not want to go to the trouble and expense to place enough AyrMesh Hubs to provide WiFi so you can walk through your fields with continuous coverage.
We realized two things: first, the Hubs (especially the “Hub2” series – The AyrMesh Hub2x2 and AyrMesh Hub2T) can be placed 2.5 miles apart, so the density of the network could be much, much less. Second, of course, we understood that most farmers drive across their land using tractors, sprayers, combines, trucks, or UTVs. So, if we put an AyrMesh Hub on the vehicle they were driving, it would be able to connect to the stationary Hubs and provide WiFi in and around the vehicle, where people are actually working. The result is a mesh that’s very sparse and only exists in limited areas (from the perspective of a “normal WiFi device”):
Spot Coverage with AyrMesh Hubs
becomes a much more dense mesh with the addition of the AyrMesh Cab Hub:
As long as you are within a few hundred yards of the vehicle you brought out in the field, you’ll have good WiFi coverage, even though the nearest stationary Hub may be over a mile away.
Using the same math we used before, we can place the Hubs 2.5 miles apart, so three “rings” of Hubs places the last Hub 7.5 miles away from the Gateway Hub. Assuming the Cab Hub can go a mile beyond the last Hub and still have very good connectivity, that gives a circle with a radius of 8.5 miles or a diameter of 17 miles. A circle 17 miles across is an area of over 226 square miles, or over 145,250 acres. Even in Texas, that’s a pretty big spread.
It should be noted that we recommend three “hops” because, each time the signal “hops” across a Hub, the available bandwidth is halved. As a result, the bandwidth after the third Hub is only 1/8 the bandwidth of the Gateway Hub. However, a fourth and even a fifth hop may be possible to provide signal to low-bandwidth devices like sensors and actuators.
Your mileage will vary (you see what I did there…) – very few farms have huge continuous acreage like this, and covering non-contiguous acreage is trickier – that’s one of the reasons we introduced the AyrMesh Bridge.
However, the result is that you can cover a LOT of acreage using AyrMesh Hubs. So we have covered how to have a relatively “dense” mesh over a smaller area and a “sparse” mesh over a much larger area. Amazingly, using the AyrMesh Hubs, you can have BOTH kinds of network at once – a dense network over one area and a sparse network out over your fields. We’ll cover that in the last installment of this series.
We get a lot of questions about the range of the AyrMesh Hubs. We do have a fairly good explanation of the range of the Hubs on Ayrstone.com, but there have been enough questions and, especially, comments on Facebook, that I decided to write a good blog post about it.
The AyrMesh Hubs offer the longest “omni-directional” WiFi range available, because they use the highest possible legal power with the highest-gain antennas.
WiFi is intrinsically a “2-way” communications medium. The Hub has to be able to transmit a signal out to whatever device you’re trying to connect AND receive a signal back from that device. The high power and high-gain antennas help cast the signal out a long ways, but the high-gain antennas also “pull in” the signal from your device, which is almost always weaker than the Hub’s signal, and that what limits the Hub’s range.
Because the Hubs have powerful radios and large antennas, they can communicate with each other up to 2.5 miles (4 km) apart. However, since a small, battery-operated device with a tiny internal antenna (think an iPhone or a Ring camera) has a tiny fraction of that output power and antenna gain, the range to that device will be MUCH less – usually a few hundred yards. The Hub is already extending the device’s range far beyond what the manufacturer ever imagined – those devices are designed for a range of 100 feet or so for use in a typical home or office.
So the range of a single Hub is excellent – a few hundred yards to a phone or up to half a mile to a laptop, but, wait, we claim we can get you wireless across your farm, right? Are we just terrible liars? Schemers? Scammers? (see numerous social media posts…)
Here is the “magic” of meshing – using additional Hubs, you can extend the range of a single Hub out far away, in every direction, for miles. Remote Hubs are like “repeaters” – they receive the mesh signal from one Hub and create a new, “fresh” (same power) WiFi signal for devices to connect to, and a new mesh signal for other Hubs to connect to. Because of this, you can “daisy-chain” Hubs out across your farm for a long ways.
There are two ways to create the mesh on your farm, which we call “spot” and “continuous,” but they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. To start with, we’ll just talk about the “continuous” method.
AyrMesh HubDuo
When you’re thinking about WiFi coverage, you’re usually thinking about continuous coverage so you can wander freely, using your phone without interruptions. Since your phone has fairly limited range, your Hubs have to be fairly close together. The AyrMesh HubDuo is perfectly suited for this kind of installation, because HubDuos can be spaced relatively closely together – as close as a few hundred feet apart using a HubDuo-specific feature called “close mode.“
There is a real danger in placing the Hubs too close together: as mentioned, the Hubs have very powerful signals – much more powerful than the devices connecting to them – so, if the Hubs are too close together, those powerful signals can “overwhelm” the nearby Hubs so they can’t “hear” normal WiFi devices. For a phone or laptop between two Hubs that are too close together, trying to “talk” to one of the Hubs is like trying to have a normal conversation at a rock concert: the Hubs are “talking” so loudly your device can’t make itself heard.
So, how do you determine where to site Remote Hubs? For continuous coverage, it’s actually pretty simple: with the device you’re going to be using the most (or most critically), just walk away from the Hub in the direction you want to extend the network until you start to lose the signal on that device. Then site a Hub about twice that distance away:
The circles indicate the maximum range from the Hub to your target device – it’s good to leave a little overlap so you’ll have continuous coverage as you go from one Hub to the other. You can continue this process with additional Hubs:
…and so on to cover the area you want. Note that, with the AyrMesh HubDuo, these can be as close as 200 yards or so (sometimes closer if there are trees, etc.), so you can have intensive coverage over a “smaller” area (under a hundred acres). They can also be placed a mile or so apart (with good “line of sight” between them) for “continuous coverage” for higher-power devices like laptops or cameras with external antennas. We recommend going no more than three “hops” from the Gateway Hub, but, with the Hubs placed a mile apart, you can have good signal for a laptop out up to three and a half miles.
This is fine for hundreds of acres, such as a farm yard, smaller farm, nursery, or other rural business. For a large production farm, we generally recommend using the “spot” method – we’ll cover that in the next post.
