That would be such a fitting ending but alas there are really a lot of them.

I think I’m so amused by the fact that I’ve totally fooled them and how fucking dumb they are that I get over the nausea. But not even kidding, one of the women told me her daughter killed her baby by putting meth in her bottle and I was able to correlate that, and I couldn’t read FB for days after.

Less trouble than you’d think. I wouldn’t call them a particularly organized group of people. Also I have convinced many of the American ones that voting for Biden will kick off race war and they’re super into that stupid idea.

Yes!

Why? I’m really good at it.

It really really really depends on the situation. How big is the home, how fast is the internet, future plans, coverage needs, etc. And budget.

IMO, most people don’t spend an appropriate amount on their internet network. They’ll spend hundreds per month for internet service from an ISP, but refuse to spend more than $60 on a router to get it from the ISP modem to their $1000 phone. It doesn’t make sense, especially when you consider that it’s a one-time cost that will serve you for many years; the per month cost of owning it is less than a cup of coffee a month, even if you buy something that’s 10x more expensive. People are so resistant to it that is crazy.

Even at $100, you’re going to get what you pay for, better than the $60 router, but it’s going to fall short of anything that’s worth keeping for extended periods of time.

Right now my blind go to, when I don’t know anything about someone’s situation, is the ubiquiti UDR. It’s an all in one device, around $200, with a WiFi 6 access point built in, and four ethernet ports, all 1Gb and two of them have PoE. The limitation is the 1Gbps internet link so anyone with an ISP connection faster than 1Gbps should go with something else. Most don’t, so this is my recommendation.

The reason I recommend it is that you can add additional access points to it as needed with basically no additional spend (beyond the ap itself). With two PoE ports, you can add two aps without worrying about whether or not you have power injectors or anything. Adding a small network switch is easy on any of the other two ports if four isn’t enough for you, and ubiquiti has some pretty cheap, small switches for that.

The UDR comes with a built in network management device (otherwise known as a “cloud key” in unifi) which puts everything into a single interface. So the access points (both internal and add on), switches, etc are all managed from a single system that’s local, and has local sign in, and has a convenient cloud interface which is free to use, and has all the same functionality.

As a starting point, this is excellent. Because having just the UDR you can service a small apartment without any add-ons. If your needs grow, you can build out as needed. If your needs grow beyond the UDR, you can upgrade to the UDM/UDM pro (or similar) and keep using all the add-ons you’ve purchased. There’s room for growth, and ubiquiti has proven themselves to be rather adequate at providing networking for the home. Unless you get into some very advanced features, it should serve whatever needs you have both now and in the future.

My recommendations obviously change depending on the situation. One person I worked with recently, I recommended the UDM pro and a pair of access points, because his ISP connection was in his furnace room. The UDM doesn’t have any WiFi built in, and the furnace room is usually a nightmare to get wireless into or out of. The connection will suck. So being able to move his access points (of which he got a couple), out of that area and into more open spaces, was critical. In that case I gifted him a Dell power connect switch and used PoE injectors to power the access points. I was able to provide a very good, very reliable network for him without ongoing difficulty or issues (which was his primary concern). Before this he struggled with the wireless from his ISP modem, and it disconnected and had very poor signal throughout his home.

Since the initial set up, I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. He’s very happy with the system. His situation had some unique challenges, and we even ran ethernet vertically up to his second floor office through what used to be a chimney stack and that had been used to install a forced air duct for the second floor. So the space was only that forced air duct from the furnace. The cable(s) share that space with the air handling duct (but are run outside of the duct for safety), and he has gigabit ethernet jacks in his office to get a reliable connection for his professional systems in the office. He probably doesn’t need the Dell switch in the mix, but it gave him extra ports for use for later.

I’ve done dozens of custom recommendations for people. At this point I’m thinking of making a website to point people to that has all the information about home networking you could need, generalized enough to always be correct. I want to include sections on different manufacturers and why wifi kind of sucks, explanations of different technologies, their benefits, pros and cons, that kind of thing. Etc… All in one place so I can link people to it and they can learn as much or as little as they want; with pages like recommendations, all time stamped so you know what’s current or recent, and deep explainer pages of different technologies and how they work and what benefits and stuff that they have if you want to know more.

It’s a huge plan, and it will take me weeks or months to write it all out. I will need to find cheap web hosting for it and get some kind of UI/UX design going for it, and build the whole thing so I can update it without having to work too hard to start the new page entry. Maybe a wiki style? Idk. I’m thinking of calling it something along the lines of “WiFi sucks” or something related… Like wifisucks (dot) com or whatever. I’m sure I’ll need help with it, mainly in the UI/UX, but it’s something I’ve been considering doing for a while, just to handle these kinds of questions continually.

I have a blog about it, called untangle the tubes, IIRC, and I go on long, in-depth rants about stuff. But it’s highly disorganized and random.

I don’t often (or ever) sell equipment. So unfortunately I may not be very helpful here.

I would suspect that the bulk gear shops are just going to individually list the items on eBay or something similar; if you want top dollar, you’ll need to sell them yourself on eBay. If you don’t care all that much, then hand them over to a highly rated bulk shop and let them do it for you.

If you have a list, I’m looking for a few pieces, and there’s others that I’d be interested in if I got them at a good price. We could work something out.

I’m also sure that there’s buy/sell communities and subreddits that you could try as well.

A short list of things I’m usually interested in is:

Catalyst switches, usually 3750 series, specifically anything PoE, but there’s other 3k/4k switches I’d like to get my hands on.

Aironet wireless, not the meraki stuff, that’s usually trash unless you have a contact and I don’t roll like that.

ISR G2 routers, usually the 19xx and 29xx series.

Anything newer than the ISR G2, like the Cisco 43xx routers and such.

I usually stay away from anything chassis based, it simply takes too much room and power compared to what I need and I get the same functionality in terms of commands and learning from smaller units, though they’re not as capable, they still function well enough for a lab/home use.

There’s other stuff I’d like to pick up, but that’s what I’m usually looking at… At least off the top of my head.

Or when they put it inside or behind a metal file cabinet and wonder why the wifi doesn’t work unless you’re right next to the file cabinet

I’m a qualified amateur operator. I can operate on any ham bands up to 190W EIRP if I recall my countries regulations correctly.

The issue with doing something like wifi on ham bands technical issues finding radio chips capable of signalling at such a high rate of speed, on bands that are able to be used by hams. There’s also the requirement for hams to identify themselves on air, and the general use of AM/FM and derivative technology on ham bands and general resistance to the OFDM used as the main signal encoding for WiFi. So finding an OFDM capable radio transmitter/receiver for use in… say, the 2m band (144Mhz … ish) is basically impossible, and there’s no way to identify. You would have to build a new protocol and standard from the ground up and use very modified or rare/expensive radio chips, and likely build the drivers/firmware for it entirely yourself. People with the required hardware, software, baseband, radio, and firmware experience that are hams who want a product like WiFi for ham radio channels is extraordinarily rare.

As for city-wide WiFi/mesh networks: it has been attempted, and has seen some limited success, but doesn’t scale well with the usual protocols. Routing protocols like BGP, OSPF and IS-IS are meant for much larger IP blocks being routed between interfaces. A wireless mesh system would use a single interface (one radio) for both send and receive, which most protocols don’t support, and each “hop” or station on the mesh would only be advertising a single IP (or an extremely small set of IPs) per participating node.

Most routing protocols assume that every node on an interface can talk to every other node on the same interface and thus there’s no need to repeat or relay messages from an interface to the same interface.

There’s also no standards that allow wifi to use multiple channels/frequencies for tx/rx, eg, send on 5.45 GHz, and receive on 5.65Ghz. it simply isn’t something that any WiFi chip is capable of. So full duplex isn’t possible right now.

The common wifi frequencies are also extremely power limited and on bands that are prone to interruption. In the wild, there’s plenty of things that can disrupt 2.4Ghz and 5/6Ghz transmissions. With the power limits, to go any significant distance, you need directional antennas that limit free space path loss so the signal travels further. In the case of wireless internet service providers (WISP, not to be confused with the mobile carriers), they generally use panel or dish antennas to extend the range. For power output, at the high end, some bands allow for upwards of 5W of directional power, or 1W of omnidirectional power (in EIRP). On the low end, handheld ham radio units start at 5W of power, and can usually attenuate their transmitter to 1W or lower as an option. Household WiFi is usually around 0.1W of power per radio. Even cranking that up to the maximum legally allowed wattage won’t result in covering more than a few blocks of a city with a fairly poor signal overall; that signal is going to be fairly easily blocked, absorbed, reflected, or otherwise attenuated by just about everything, including, but not limited to the structure of your house.

Meanwhile, standing in my home with a 5W handheld transceiver operating on 70cm (440Mhz), I can hit a repeater that’s something like 10 miles away with a nearly perfect signal over FM, without assistance. OFDM signals would likely be scrambled beyond recognition at 2.4 or 5 GHz across that much of a gap, or even one that’s 1/10th as far, with only 1W of legal power, without using some kind of directional antenna or antenna array.

Don’t get me wrong, well configured wireless can go so far that you have to account for the curvature of the earth, but they’re always very very directional, using dish antennas or similar.

Don’t get me wrong, the ideas are great, but the challenges faced are enormous. It can quickly turn into a lifelong project to get something functional, and even then, there’s no guarantee that it will ever catch on as a product. The limitation for ham operators regarding encryption is problematic when it comes to data communication as well, since just about everything that’s data-driven on the internet implements SSL. Computers and systems expect encryption all over the place and bluntly, those messages cannot be sent over ham bands. There’s nuance to that regulation, at least in my country, but I won’t get into the fine print here.

Even so, there are some crude digital modes used by ham operators which are normally voice encoding or plain text encoding. Uses are limited on purpose. If you’re interested in longer distance emergency communications you could look into LoRA, which is relatively new.

There’s a lot more to say on this, but bluntly, I’ve said enough. It’s all interconnected, and I love it, but I’m just ranting now.

Never knew. There is a right ‘tool’ for every job. I live in a rainy place.

I’ve updated my OP with more details

I wouldnt murderer you, but I cannot promise you will survive. Its very hostile terrain in Australia, after all.

It’s better to have a pair, because rabbits are very very social animals. A lone bunny can get bored, anxious, and very very destructive. The trade off is that the pair may not be as cuddly and attentive to their owner as a lone bunny, but they will be immeasurably happier.

Cats are predators, and rabbits are prey animals. You can have cats and rabbits together but it’s not recommended - it takes less than a second for Kitty to go from “this is a friend” to “this is dinner”, or for BunBun to literally kick the guts out of its former pal. Same thing with dogs; bunnies can and will end up on the wrong end of the prey instinct and can either get destroyed or end up dead of shock/fright. And people are not fast enough to keep these things from happening in 99% of cases.

Side note: some people keep rabbits and guinea pigs together. This is a terrible idea because even though their diets and habits are similar, guinea pigs carry bacteria in their guts that can absolutely fuck up a bunny.

It’s just the right amount of DIY to be engaging and so cheap to get into. Plus the discord community is really active.

This is LoRa but there’s heavy crossover with the HAM community.

They operate in bands intended for stuff like LoRa and IoT. So there’s no danger of messing with other systems.

Not that far. Most LoRa systems use UHF bands so you need LoS to get these super low powered radios to work.

I’m not much of an expert but it’s basically low power UHF radios that use a particular waveform and FFT process to decode signals that are well below background noise. My radio regularly picks up messages with an SNR -10. I like it to the GPS system’s algorithms.

The main drawback is that, because they’re low power, you have to have LOS between antennas.

I think the breathability depends on the tightness of the weave, but yes unfortunately one of the main downsides of cellulose fibers is that they don’t wet very well and thus don’t wick moisture much at all

Yes, though I find the wrinkles come out as easily as they go in

You are the 6th person I’ve convinced to listen to tma. My sphere of influence grows further.