said by disconnected :Multipath is a killer. And at nearly 2GHz, individual LEAVES become reflectors. Millions of them, fluttering in the breeze.
Notice the huge difference between windy and calm days: »
Re: RSSI fluctuationsCuriously my very first post in DSLR was about making 2.4Ghz links through foliage ( »
Re: Country House to City House (2 mile NLOS) link ) back in 2004. I posted example paths through foliage later on (
»
Best way to deal with wet foliage? ) and also provided suggestions to other WISPs to make such links.
The obscure "multi-path" antennas we used in those links had wider beam (because of moderate gain) and was somewhat insensitive to polarization. That explained their seemingly better performance than higher gain fixed polarization antennas.
I did some research in 2006/7 using arrays of single patch antennas (nominally 6.5dBi each) oriented at random angles plus with a low insertion loss combiner and LNA. That worked even better through foliage.