A group of Ohio college students has successfully set the world record for accomplishing the longest unamplified Wi-Fi link in history. They were able to communicate between two mountain tops 124.9 miles apart - one near Las Vegas, NV, and one in Utah. The group smashed their previous record of 55 miles. 
In addition to the mountain to mountain connection, they also successfully connected to a wireless access point in Las Vegas (22 miles away) and surfed the Web - now THAT is wireless networking!
To accomplish these feats, they had to do some interesting engineering and hacking. Here's the equipment they used:
Nevada side
12 ft Dish
Scaffolding tower
Home Brew Patch Antenna and Feed
RF relays provided by Zetron
LMR-400 Coax
Averatec 3200 Laptop
Ubuntu Hoary with 2.6.10 kernel
Running hostap modules
Utah side
10 ft Dish
Homebuilt collapsible trailer with dish mounted on it
3 watt bidirectional amplifier – only used during the amplified portion of the contest
Home Brew Patch Antenna and Feed
RF relays provided by Zetron
LMR-400 Coax
Averatec 3200 Laptop
Debian Sarge with 2.6.12.3 kernel
Running hostap modules
To find out more about this group of enterprising college students, visit their site at http://www.wifiworldrecord.com/ .
They were also recently written up in Tom's Hardware - that article is here: http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050802_103659.html
