Ask HN: What's with the DIY state of the art long-range Wi-Fi?

Hey,

I lead the technical efforts at one of the charities in Ukraine; we're now trying to rebuild connectivity for people in some of the areas where much of the civilian infrastructure was destroyed and Starlink® is not a viable option, or perhaps "not-to-be easily scaled option."

The world of long-range Wi-Fi is a wild one!

We are now trying to evaluate the cost of a point-to-point mesh network using commodity hardware, and so far have only experimented with Raspberry hardware to work the antenna, and some Atheros AR9331-based SoC's. The idea is to make a single device that can act as both a relay station, as well as an actual hotspot, it then can be placed in line-of-sight configuration to potentially cover huge areas (the accepted performance would be anywhere from 0.1-1 Mbit/s point-to-point over anywhere from 5-20km. We are aiming to bring the cost of such configuration down to $100 per unit at least. Hopefully, we also wouldn't need to do so and somebody else could do the whole thing for us at a similar price... Where would you start, i.e. with the vendors, as well as the commodity hardware, firmware that should work best for a setup like this? Bonus points; if it can be somewhat be aware of the current happenstance. In terms of bleed from Electronic warfare deployed by the enemy in Ukraine; it has to work hopefully in adversarial environment!

Best regards, Ilya The Stone Cross Foundation