/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1189244
The signal gets sketchy because you receive a lot less of it. Imagine that you're sending out one watt of power in a cone aimed at your plane. At one meter range, the cone hasn't spread out very far and you can receive 0.75W power. But at 100m, the cone is very spread out and you can only receive 0.01W of power.

Look at pic, it's of a magnet. It's the same thing with radio waves. Close to the magnet, the field is strong and dense, so there's a lot more iron powder there. Further out the field gets weaker, so less powder is attracted to there. With your radio, the signal is strong close to the transmitter and weak far away. It has nothing to do with how long it takes your signal to travel there, what matters is how strong the signal is when you pick it up.

Imagine that your signal halves in strength each meter further away you go. Pretty quickly your signal is very weak. So the reason your signal is sketchy at long range is the same as why your signal is sketchy if you're driving from the other side of a wall: Less of the signal is reaching your thing.