Why I dislike DFS channels, and you might too

As many of you know, I’m a voice guy. And in voice every millisecond counts. That is the main reason why I dislike DFS channels, because they introduce significant delay, which is lost time. But how bad can the lost time really be? And why do you care if you’re not running voice? Well folks, flick the lights on, pull the cover close and read on… it gets scary (yes, scarier than Ghost Frames™).

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Finding Neighbor Reports in a Wireshark capture

I was looking through a packet frame capture today and noticed some Neighbor reports for the first time. While I had the opportunity I thought it would be useful to grab the Wireshark filter for them. I then did way too much thinking and realised I should put them into a blog post.

Note: I will now revert to the queens English and return the U’s into the word Neighbour.

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Business reasons to buy ESS and the Sidekick

Last week I was asked, at short notice, for a list of benefits to buying Ekahau Site Survey and Sidekicks by my management, given we already own all the software and tools needed to run our existing AirMagnet estate. We all know the Sidekick is a huge leap forward in technology, but my bosses aren’t asking if the tech is better, they’re asking if it will make us more efficient, ultimately leading to a higher ROI.
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What EAP type is it using?

As part of my role I assess existing WLAN’s for Voice support. During the survey I like to independently verify as much of the information I’ve been given as possible using protocol analysis.. One setting that I always struggled to find was the security in use, particularly when EAP / Dot1X was in use.

I had most of it figured out and was able to answer my last few questions when I took the CWAP course recently with Peter Mackenzie (@MackenzieWiFi). So here is a look at spotting the security in use on an SSID.

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Desperate times call for desperate adapter measurements

I found out something alarming recently. I was already aware that different wireless devices had different ‘Receiver Sensitivity‘, but I wrongly assumed that devices of the same model would have the same sensitivity. For example, I assumed that all Proxim Orinoco 8494 adapters, probably the most popular WiFi test adapter for WLAN professionals, would have the same sensitivity because they are the same product, with the same components, made the same way, by the same manufacturer.

It turns out I was wrong!

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How to join the WLAN community for free

I must admit I had a “meatier” topic in mind for my first real blog post. But today, as I interacted with members of the WLAN community whom I have never met before, on two different mediums (well you can argue it was just one… “the Internet”), I thought it might be helpful to other new, shy wireless engineers if I took a moment to write about how (I think) I successfully joined that community. Continue reading “How to join the WLAN community for free”