This microchip can extend your Wi-Fi way beyond your router—and yeah, Comcast hates this. In this build I mess with Wi‑Fi HaLow (sub‑GHz, long range, low power) and show why it’s such a big deal: it’s real IP networking that can roam with you. The whole point is a parallel wireless stack you can actually own—no licenses, no cloud login, no gatekeepers—using cheap, off‑the‑shelf hardware that’s barely been touched by consumers. I rig up a “poor man’s MANET” in the field: a UniFi Express as the local network, a Raspberry Pi HaLow gateway (Ethernet into the router) to “HaLow‑enable” the network, and a tiny $6-ish MCU camera client that spins up an HTTP video stream. Then I pull that live FPV feed directly into ATAK in a remote area and drive away from the camera to see where it breaks. With my janky setup and the default OpenWRT image running lower power than it could, I hit around ~1,500 ft while streaming video—better than normal Wi‑Fi, but not search‑and‑rescue grade yet. The takeaway: HaLow is legit, but tuning matters. Channel width, bitrate, antennas, and transmit power (dBm) are everything—and in the next build I’m going full mesh (BATMAN + 802.11s) to get closer to a true mobile ad hoc network where “you don’t need a carrier because you are the carrier.”