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.

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.