Handcrafted Wi-Fi

  Most of us have all done an APoS (AP on a stick) survey, either active or passive, for a customer by now.  Many of us also take a snapshot of the spectrum while doing our WLAN surveys.  We either use an integrated Spectrum Analyzer, such as the DBx adapter coupled with Ekahau’s ESS software, or we use a spectrum analyzer adapter(hardware) and software to collect data for off-site analysis.   If you own the DBx adapter and use it with Ekahau, that doesn’t mean you own Chanalzyer, which is Metageeks Spectrum Analyzer software.  Which leads me to this post, as I do not own a copy of the software mentioned previously.   If you are on-site, using a Cisco 3602i series autonomous AP for your APoS active/passive survey, did you know that with just a little bit of effort you can use it to grab your Spectrum Analysis file?   I usually have my old Dell D630 workhorse with me, which has a PCM/CIA  slot, an old Cognio card, and Cisco Spectrum Expert loaded on it.  However, as most of you know, th

  When doing any WLAN Assessment or Remediation, we ALWAYS look at the spectrum.   In about 60% of the WLANs we assess and remediate, we find interference from a device the customer didn’t know they had, or knew they had but didn’t know it was sharing the same spectrum as their Wi-F.   The complaints vary from Customers that have interference issues.  We hear “I only have two bars”, “my wireless is slow” and “when I stand right here, my Wi-Fi doesn’t work”.   We’ll first start out with stating the obvious.  The 5GHz UNII bands are license free, which means it is a free-for-all when it comes to who is doing what.  Most of us all understand that.  A company, or their neighbors, can pretty much deploy anything they want, as long as they abide by the rules.   When we first start out on an Assessment, we do what we normally call a WLAN Validation.  We walk the entire facility with Ekahau’s ESS – or Site Survey Software.  Ekahau recently updated their software to include Spectrum Integration

I recently came across this some equipment that interfered with Wi-Fi in the worst way – well, that’s my opinion, and I will let you be the judge.   We’ll first start out with stating the obvious.  The 5GHz UNII bands are license free, which means it is a free-for-all when it comes to who is doing what.  Most of us (the folks reading our blogs) all understand that.  However, when an Enterprise environment has millions and millions of square feet of office, retail, healthcare or manufacturing space, I think the Company’s Enterprise IT department owes it to their internal customers to have a Spectrum Policy to keep the spectrum in check.  Letting the company buy whatever they want, whenever they want, and deploying it randomly as they see fit, doesn’t work well, as you will see if you continue reading.   I recently came across a surgery center consisting of 8+ operating rooms, and the Wi-Fi was at the core of the complaints.  Nurses had to move their mobile workstations outside of the op

  I often see the requirement that a WLAN site survey and design must be done by the AP-on-a-stick method.  That said, you’ll want to use the same AP for your survey that you will use in production – or one that is similar.  In this case, we are going to convert a lightweight access point to Autonomous, so that we can use it without a WLAN Controller.  The new survey rig is a Cisco 3602i, configured with 5GHz channel 157, set to 40 MHz. How did we turn the lightweight AP into an Autonomous and do the quick and drity configuration?  The short answer is, we followed Richard McIntosh’s directions.  His blog, and a great “HowTo” is here: https://ciscotophat.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/configuring-a-3602-for-wireless-surveying/   Thanks again, Richard, for putting that out there for everyone to read. We altered the power output of the new survey rig as sort of an experiment to see how the signal propagated, and where our -67dBm and -85dBm boundaries lie.  Why did I choose those numbers, you as