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Has anyone used a remote probe or appliance?

I have a large 802.11b install in a metropolitan areas and was looking to setup a remote monitor.
I have seen some devices out there but was just considering a laptop with AiroPeek and a phone line or Cell card.

The thing I would like to see mostly is the RF retries. There is much congestion in this area.

Also is there any evidence that channel 3 performs better than others? I have two large installs with much congestion and channel 3 seems to perform the best out of the eleven.

Regards

The best you can do its to place a laptop with an amplified antenna using airopeek for example a PCMCIA card of 300mw and antenna omni of 15 dB to see what its happen on your wifi network, that its the best solution if you dont have enough money to fix this.
But if you have bugdet to do that i recommend to use Aruba swith controller and place Air monitors to troubleshoot your network, aruba use a technology Adaptive Radio Managment when he saw to much retry and interference in 1 channel, the cntroller switch the AP to the less conegested channel, also he support remote troubleshotting with airopeek and ethereal.
And you need to detect interference sources maybe that it the problem you have on the other channels except of channel 3.

If you are already using AiroPeek / OmniPeek, you can purchase some WildPackets RF Grabbers if you have the bandwidth to stream the data in realtime, or an Omni Wireless Sensor.

Thanks zurc, What do you mean by "Air monitors"?

Also do you have a link for this equipment? I went to there web site but did
not see a page to what you are takining about.

Have you used a decent 15dbi omni antenna? I have not had good luck in applications where I use a omni antenna with more than 9db gain.

Thanks

Hi,
this the link for the swith controller http://arubanetworks.com/products/.
The Air monitor its a software funtion not hardware, the AP can works for Access Point and Air Monitor you configure that on software in the controller.

The antenna you can find in this link
http://www.hyperlinktech.com/web/hg2415u_pro.php
And yes i have one of this and i use this PCMCIA card http://www.ubnt.com/super_range_cardbus.php4

if i can help you more, send me an another post.
:)

where did you buy this card from?

http://www.ubnt.com/super_range_cardbus.php4

mmmmm, i dont remeber, try in expansys website........