WifiNigel

I’ve recently been involved with a project that has brought me into contact with a number of wireless engineers who are performing WLAN survey work using the traditional “AP on a stick” (APOAS) survey method. Yes, there are plenty of people out there who still prefer this method, or have customers who demand it. One thing that has become apparent is that a number of people are still using power sources (generally a battery pack) for their survey AP that still only supports the 802.3af POE (power over Ethernet) standard. The time has come for those using these legacy power supplies to make an investment and  upgrade their AP power packs to support the higher power provided by the 802.3at standard. The next generation of wireless access points simply won’t allow the continued use of 802.3af power packs, due to the enhanced power requirements of modern APs. Background Until relatively recently, many Enterprise grade wireless access points have been able to work with the

I recently attended the Ekahau Certified Survey Engineer (ECSE) training course, presented by Keith Parsons. In addition to learning about using Ekahau Site Survey  (ESS), Keith also shared some valuable insights in to best practice wireless LAN design and surveying techniques. One of these insights was a best practice approach to measuring loss through obstructions and attenuation areas, such as doors, walls and warehouse racking, when gathering data for a WLAN predictive model.  In this article, I’ll share the details of that approach and some mistakes you might be making in your own measuring approach. Please visit the Ekahau blog site to see my guest posting for the full details on this topic.

When designing WiFi networks, a crucial part of the design process is the wireless survey. This may be a traditional ‘AP on a stick’ survey or may be an off-site, ‘desktop’, predictive survey. In amongst the variety of variables that need to be considered, including coverage and capacity, there is one crucial item that is easy to forget: how does the designed wireless network look from the point of view WiFi clients that will actually use the network? Background Best practice for wireless surveying usually dictates that prior to completing a survey for a new WiFi deployment design, a pre-survey questionnaire will be supplied to your customer. This document will ask about the environment that the network is to be deployed into. It will include information such as physical building characteristics, cabling and switch infrastructure, health and safety considerations, access arrangements etc.   In addition, the pre-survey questionnaire will also request information from the custo

Being able to convert electronic floor plans into formats supported by a wireless survey or management tool is a regular part of being a WiFi professional. A customer may often provide floor plans in a format that isn’t accepted by the particular tool that you are using, leaving you with a file-conversion headache. In this article we take a look at a solution (for Windows users) to convert two common file types into a useable format. Background When using a professional wireless survey tool, one of the first steps in preparing your survey project is to import an electronic copy of the building floor plans. The plans are used to show areas surveyed and the RF measurements (“heapmaps”) that have been taken. Similarly, once a WiFi network has been installed, there is often a requirement to import floor plans into a network management system (NMS) to show the areas covered by the new deployment. This may be a cloud-based console or perhaps a dedicated on-site management server