[TriLUG] WiFi quality monitoring

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2014, Igor Partola wrote:

> - Intermittent but high packet loss over Wi-Fi. This can last anywhere
> from 2 to 60 seconds where 5-75% of the packets are lost.

I had similar problems with a wifi installation I did in a business once. 
Sometimes everything would be fine and sometimes I couldn't connect from right 
next to the wifi box. Use of a wifi sniffer (forget what it is - it was a 
regular wifi usb dongle with windows software set up to run a spectrum of the g 
band) showed nothing.

The rf front ends of wifi routers have no filtering on them. They are designed 
to be cheap. They're easily overloaded by out of band signals. The cure is a 
wifi box with a different rf front end. I was lucky enough to find that the 
first different brand worked fine. After that I found that the original box 
worked fine if I used a paper clip instead of the antenna(s). Of course range 
was only a couple of feet and the original box couldn't be used that way, but at 
least it showed that the problem was due to rf.

Can you try a bunch of different wifi boxes?

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
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