Is there a way to get WiFi NOISE levels for a mobile device?

Paul B. Andersen wrote

Interesting, just do some tests. My house has massive patio doors instead of windows in all but the bathrooms and toilets and kitchens, 13 of the patio doors.

What sort of walls ? Mine are concrete block but because of the patio doors, most of the time my router sends thru the glass. Not with the wifi extender tho, its got a block wall between the router and the wifi extender.

I did try using just a router at another place where a mate of mine has the house next door to his son's place with the son having an adsl service and wifi router and my mate has nothing but couldn't get a useable service even with the router just inside the wall closest to his house. I assume that that was because the house has that aluminium on plastic sheet insulation in the wall. That was before I got started on wifi extenders and I haven't got around to having another go at that with another wifi extender because there was a real possibility of him getting his own adsl service.

True. I didn't have the tablet then, I must get back to him and see what he wants to do about that now and have another go at it. Get complicated tho, he's dying of diabetes and we didn't expect him to last this long. He's had one leg chopped off and even just going to the toilet really takes it out of him due to his very bad heart.

Reply to
Rod Speed
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Paul B. Andersen wrote

Yeah, tho dsl is a lot easier to setup, just plug it in and go.

I've set it up for almost everyone I know.

I don't get any asterisks on mine for some reason.

No asterisks at all for some reason.

Love it, definitely a keeper.

Yeah, must do that in case some stop being free.

Reply to
Rod Speed

The walls are stucco on the outside, gypsum on the inside, and wood & fiberglass in the middle.

The windows out here are all mandated to be some kind of sunlight factor (I don't know the details) that means they have metal in the glass somehow. It's illegal, as I recall, to replace the glass with anything else.

It's absolutely shocking how well the glass attenuates a radio signal.

Wow. I'm sorry for him. I wish him the best. I have been researching this thing called "insulin resistance", which seems to have some merit. It's the oddest diet in the world though, where you consume lots of fat, and some protein, but no carbs (well, 22 grams of carbs a day, which is so little that you can't not get that much).

Your tongue tastes like it has been licking paint thinner, since you switched your metabolism from glucosis to ketosis (you used up all the glucose in your body and liver glycogen in the first two or three days).

The theory is that, over time, on this high-fat almost no-carb diet, your body eventually normalizes & reduces the insulin resistance, which sort of cures the pre-diabetes since insulin is secreted in massive amounts from the pancreas when you're in insulin resistance (which simply means the receptor cells don't react like they used to, so you need more and more insulin to get the same effect).

Anyway, I wish him the best, as glucose is a poison when in high amounts in the body, if insulin isn't getting it out of the blood and into the cells, liver glycogen, and adipose fat stores.

Reply to
Paul B. Andersen

Paul B. Andersen wrote

Yeah, that's what my wifi extender calls it too.

Yes, that is correct.

Yeah, that's why I did it that way.

I only have an external TV antenna and its just off the edge of the flat roof so is only 11' off the ground. Some very big trees along the park/south side of the house and I've never had a lightning strike on those, yet.

Reply to
Rod Speed

Hmmmmm... dunno why. Maybe I get the asterisks only because it knows that there are two SSIDs that it calls 'similar'.

I guess I could turn one router off, but, as I said, I'm in bed, and if I move about, the whole house goes bonkers because of the alarm noises, so, I'll save that for another day.

Gnite, and thanks for all the good details.

Reply to
Paul B. Andersen

One *huge* advantage in outdoor applications of the WISP radios (which, incidentally, cost the same as a puny router) is that they have the POWER thing all figured out.

They use 15 to 24VDC power over Ethernet, so, you can easily go about 300 feet (and you can daisy chain them further).

So, if you have to run wires anyway, you would rather run outdoor cat5 instead of outdoor extension cords.

The advantages?

  1. Same cost as a router
  2. 300' of cat5 is cheaper than 300' of extension cord
  3. No loss in speed
  4. Best of all, signal strength 10x that of a router (at least in the USA)
Reply to
Paul B. Andersen

Lightning is a strange beast. It actually mostly comes from the ground and goes *up* into the sky, so, in effect, it *knows* where you are at all times.

You don't want to be near where lines of force converge, as in the tip of anything metal, for example.

At that point, the electric field lines build up, and, zzzzzap, the air molecules are rarefied into a plasma (as I understand it).

That plasma is basically a liquid column of electrons, which allows the current to flow in massive amounts, if only for a split second.

Kaboom! By the time you hear the sonic waves from the pulsating pressure wave, you're dead.

Reply to
Paul B. Andersen

Paul B. Andersen wrote

Yeah, I assumed it was that, most commonly seen in north america.

We don't have anything like that here, but it doesn't get anything like as cold here. There is just one recorded event of snow here in the met records and it didn't see any snow on the ground at all.

Yeah, I'm not surprised with the metallisation.

You get the same effect with microwave oven windows.

Wouldn't appeal to me, my breakfast is a great slab of my own multigrain toast, as thick as will still go in the toaster with the toaster chosen to be able to do the thickest toast. And roast potatoes almost every night except when eating pizza or steak.

That doesn't appeal either.

I don't have that problem myself, I'm right in the middle of the ideal BMI and walk for exercise a lot except in the winter.

Yeah, that's why he had his leg chopped off. Managed to burn it on the engine cover in the RV because he had no feeling in his feet and it never did heal due to the diabetes.

He's got one hell of a slow heartbeat. They were planning to fit a pacemaker but gave up on that due to the MRSA they never could get rid of.

Reply to
Rod Speed

Paul B. Andersen wrote

Yeah, I should know tomorrow. The grandson has just showed up borrowing a power cord and has said he wants to use the wifi extender and I have said I will power it tomorrow. Its just gone 6pm here and there are no lights out there and a hell of a jungle in my backyard.

No problem, see ya tomorrow.

Reply to
Rod Speed

The economics is a bit different here because I normally use what I have got from garage/yard sales for peanuts with routers and extension cords and don't see long CAT5 very often at all at those, if ever.

Reply to
Rod Speed

It is indeed, surprisingly unpredictable.

Yes, it often does.

Not if you stay inside the house etc.

Or being the highest thing around like on flat ground well away from the trees etc.

Yep.

Yep.

Or very severely burnt and unlikely to live for long.

Reply to
Rod Speed

In my travels, I've come to know extenders and repeaters as being synonymous. The marketing folks call them extenders, but the technical folks call them repeaters. They are wireless devices that spend half their time listening and the other half talking, repeating what they heard. They operate on a single channel and reduce the effective throughput by more than half.

OTOH, when the connection into the network is wired rather than wireless, it's an Access Point (AP). An AP is usually configured to use a different, non-overlapping channel than the main WiFi device, and it can use the same SSID or a different SSID, depending on your needs.

To me, it sounds like you have an Access Point and he has an extender/repeater, BICBW.

Reply to
Char Jackson

Is this what you're saying, in a nutshell?

  1. Extender = same as repeater
  2. Repeater = wireless, same channel, same or different SSID
  3. Access Point = wired, different channel, same or different SSID

If so, then Mr. Rod Speed has a repeater/extender, while I have a second access point wired to my main router.

I never looked up the definitions, so, maybe I have been using the words repeater/extender incorrectly.

I stand corrected.

Reply to
Paul B. Andersen

A range extender or wireless repeater (same thing) give me the most problems with streaming video because of the limited size of the various buffers along the path. If you do a throughput test from one of the internet speed tests, or with a local program (iperf3), you'll see that the graphs of the speeds are very erratic and jumpy. That's fine for streaming audio, where buffering 15-20 seconds of music is common, but not for video, where the same buffers might be only seconds long.

I'm on vacation for a few days would like to avoid doing my standard rant on why wi-fi repeaters/extenders/mesh-networks suck. This is close enough: I also gave a talk on my wi-fi mesh networks suck: which includes some derogatory remarks on repeaters and extenders. The screen grabs show it best. This is 802.11g/n direct (no repeater): and this is through a Netgear something repeater: Notice that direct is twice the speed and rather consistent, while through the repeater is half the speed and rather erratic.

A "range extender" and "wireless repeater" are the same thing usually involving a single access point and a single client computah. A "wireless mesh network" is the same, except it usually involves one access point that's connected to the internet, and multiple clients. It's much the same distinction as a wired bridge, which has exactly 2 ports, and a wired switch, which 3 or more ports. In other words, a mesh network is an expanded version of the two port range extender.

Nope. They're identical. Both "store and forward" packets. Since only one transmitter can be on the air at a time, this store and forward action produces twice as many packets flying through the air at a time, which reducing the maximum speed. For example, if your direct link between your client computah runs at some speed, at best adding a repeater will cut it in half. Often, it's much worse than half.

The exceptions to this are the full duplex repeaters and the cross band repeaters. Both are rather scarce in home wi-fi hardware, but fairly common in mesh networks. The store and forward delay only happens because the repeater cannot transmit and receive at the same time with only one radio. However, by adding a 2nd radio, on a different channel, it can simultaneously transmit while receiving. Similarly, the added 2nd radio can be on a different band, such as

5GHz. There's still a slight reduction in speed, because packets need to be received completely before they can be retransmitted, but since a packet can be received while the previous packet is being transmitted, the maximum speed reduction is not as drastic and certainly not 50%.

Sigh. I never could understand the "fear of wires" problem. If you look at advertising photos of computer systems, you NEVER see any wires. They're always hidden from sight. No power cords, no monitor cables, no chargers, no tangled mess of wires that are the bane of interior decorators everywhere. It's like the wired equivalent of the tin foil hat people found among wireless devices. I see a few mouse cables, but that's it.

Lightning protection is easy. Do good deeds and you will not incur the wrath of the thunder gods.

Yawwnnn... back to sleep. I need my vacation.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

What about for non-jail broken iOS devices?

Reply to
Ant

Right.

Rong. You cannot repeat from one SSID to another SSID. The Wi-Fi infrastructure mode decrees that you can only send packets to devices with the same SSID. So it is written, so it must be, unless you run an Ad-Hoc network.

Same problem. You can't connect across different SSID's except with an ad-hoc network, which doesn't have an SSID.

The access point is just the wireless bridge part of a wireless router. More specifically, a wireless access point is a wireless bridge. On one side of the bridge, you have an ethernet connection that would go to a router or modem. On the other side, you have another ethernet connection, but one that encapsulates all the ethernet packets inside 802.11 packets. Traffic only moves across the bridge when the designated destination address is across the other side of the bridge (except for broadcasts and management packets, which go everywhere).

Sounds right. Manufacturer names and model numbers will settle the matter.

You're in good company as many manufacturers and writers have the same problem. I once tried to untangle the various forms of "bridge": Since nobody has bothered to correct this over the years, I'll assume I got it right. One thing to remember is that everything in Wi-Fi happens at Layer 2 (MAC layer). Layer 3 (TCP/IP) is only involved in managing the device usually via a web browser.

No need to stand up when correcting yourself. It can be done sitting down.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Apple has a policy the proscribes wi-fi sniffers on their devices. Here's one article on the problem:

Here's the rules of the app game which do NOT include anything specific on sniffing, thus making it an "unwritten" policy (unless I missed something): It's one of the reasons I dumped my iPhone and switched to Android.

This is about the most that can be done without jailbreaking:

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

If you are taking OSI here, layer 2 is the data link layer. It has a sub-layer that handles media access control, so "Layer 2 (MAC layer)" is an ambiguous phrase. But, yes, bridging is a link layer function.

IP is a network protocol (layer 3), but TCP is a transport protocol (layer 4).

Reply to
Ben Bacarisse

Trying again, how's this?

Repeater = wireless, same channel, same SSID (infrastructure mode) Extender = same as repeater Access Point (infrastructure mode) = wired, same or different channel, same SSID

Summarizing the suggested article that Jeff provided:

  1. Routers generally come configured to use "Infrastructure Mode":
  2. Infrastructure Mode = central access point required for all devices (SSID).
  3. Ad-Hoc Mode = central access point not required for all devices (no SSID).

Jeff: I never understood "bridges" (nor Gateways), but, I do understand my wired access point, so, if *that* is merely a bridge to my router, then I understand bridges (which I knew to be at the MAC level since the MAC of the mobile device is known to the router but not known to the Internet).

Thanks! (The weather is much cooler today, isn't it!).

Reply to
Paul B. Andersen

I had not realized that my WRT54G wired as an access point (i.e., a bridge) to my Netgear main router is at half the speed.

Bummer.

Reply to
Paul B. Andersen

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