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Wifi normally uses adaptive transmit power and data rates. If the signal gets a bit weaker, your link slows down from say 300 Mbps to 260 Mbps. No biggie.

But sometimes for direct links you set the modulation, power and data rate fixed. The end result is that changing channel conditions can turn the link from 'working perfectly' to 'not working at all'

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(Author here) For our Wi-Fi bridge, the devices on both ends were set to max power.

I don't recall them being able to change data rates very much (if at all) because the ones at the beginning of the story were 802.11g devices, and 802.11g didn't have channel bonding capability or similar tricks up its sleeve. Newer equipment definitely has more options like this.

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