WifiNigel

When it comes to designing WLAN RF environments, everyone seems to have their favourite cell edge signal level that they like to shoot for. Common figures include -67dBm for voice grade WLANs, maybe -60dBm for higher 802.11ac speeds and perhaps -72dBm for general data traffic coverage. Each vendor and wireless consultant seems to have their own preferred cell edge design target that will vary with WLAN requirements. However, these figures are meaningless without some type of explanation or context. If you rely solely on these types of figures, you are very likely designing incorrectly.... Background Around 18 months ago, I was involved in a project that required the deployment of a new wireless LAN network at many sites around the globe. The project required that all sites would be subject to the same standard of RF parameters to provide a consistent design approach at all sites. A team was sent to the first site to perform an “AP on a stick” survey using an AP of the same mo

A while back I published my CWAP study notes on another blogging platform which I've since abandoned. I've had another request to re-publish them, so here they are for your reading pleasure. Note that these apply to an older version of the CWAP exam, but still have some great information summarized in there. Here are the files I put together for each chapter. I fizzled out note-taking wise at chapter 10 (802.11 HT) , hence its omission from this list (sorry!). CWAP study note files: Chapter 1 - 802.11 Overview Chapter 2 - Physical Layer Format Chapter 3 - 802.11 MAC Sub-layer Frame Format Chapter 4 - 802.11 Management Frames Chapter 5 - 802.1 Control Frames Chapter 6 - Data Frames Chapter 7 - 802.11 Medium Contention Chapter 8 - Power Management Chapter 9  802.11 Security

I recently read a very nice article by Matt Frederick about using a Windows command prompt utility to gain information about what your Windows wireless adapter is up to while connected to a Wi-Fi network ( https://finesine.com/2016/09/17/using-netsh-wlan-show-interfaces-to-monitor-associationroaming/) In  Matt’s article, he described how he wrapped the ‘netsh’ command into a nice little batch file to run the command regularly, allowing information to be presented in a more dynamic fashion. I was so impressed with the information provided by the utility, that I decided I’d  try to get the information it provides into a more usable format. In short, I hacked together a Windows Powersell script that runs the ‘netsh’ CLI utility regularly and parses the output data into a CSV format. By piping the output into a file, you can get a nice CSV file that can be opened in Excel to look at the raw data over a period of time. It’s great for looking at the adapter signal level and BSSID