Looking at the distances between islands, it's unlikely that microwave solutions will work for your friend. Sorry about that. The limits of commodity 802.11 hardware is probably on the order of 5-10 miles. Fancier licensed carrier grade gear can go a bit further, but generally in order to reach the higher ends of those distances, the sending and receiving antennas have to be at higher altitudes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_zone#Fresnel_zone_clearance), so either very very tall towers or placed on natural elevation peaks.

Physics can be a real PITA sometimes....

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 9:08 AM, Steve Berl <steveberl@gmail.com> wrote:
A friend of mine is involved in a project to provide low cost weather forecasting and emergency communications in the Marshall Islands. He was asking me about various ham radio protocols like AX.25 and it occurred to me that a mesh network using WiFi radios might be a better solution that could provide general Internet access for a similar or even lower cost.

The stations would need to be able to operate in remote. unattended locations with only solar power. I am thinking that each island could have one or more "central" sites with long distance links to one or two (or more) other islands, and then a local network that would be used to communicate locally on that island.

I'm still gathering more info about distances and elevations of the islands, and whether line of site communications is possible.

Can anyone think of reasons why this would or would not be a good way to do things?

--
-steve

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