pfSense as wireless AP transmit power adjustments?

[JonathanLee]

@stephenw10

Done ch 1 now. I am next to it however it is moved it to the middle of house and changed it to Channel width HT/20. I got so tired of the neighbors internet killing my signal. I am so tired of it. This fixed it. My kitchen was the major concern and living room. I can run the airport extreme and extend the pfsense wifi if needed. Everyone is using 5-6 in our area for some reason.

1 neighbor runs about 3 SSIDs one is a guest that is an advertisement for Xfinity, they run it on a channel for no reason as open wifi as a sales pitch, it's weird I would sue them for that if it was my wifi. It is open and you sometimes connect and it displays sign up today its like a sale pitch captive portal with a host webpage and thats it.

[stephenw10]

Interesting, what tool is that?

Yeah really there is only 1,6 and 11. If you like to live on the edge, like me, there's 1,5,9 and 13 but there is some minimal interference between those. Realistically there's interference on every channel though so....

[JonathanLee]

I love Powerline Networking, forget network cables :) they work great my dmark runs to a wall outlet and i plug the other powerline adapter any plug I want rj45 at and bingo it works

This is not the same as WiFi extenders.

[stephenw10]

Yup, I agree. Some people hate Ethernet-over-Powerline but I've always had good experiences with them. Far better than WIFI extenders IMO.

[JonathanLee]

@stephenw10 the SG-2100 with the Comptex card works great!! Thanks for the recommendations

[johnpoz]

@JonathanLee said in pfSense as wireless AP transmit power adjustments?:

it's weird I would sue them for that if it was my wifi.

You understand many of these isp devices they give you will share out your internet connection to other customers as hot spots right?

Why would you run on channel 2?? There are only 3 possible channels that make any sense to run on 2.4 that is 1, 6 and 11.. If your running on any other channel your doing it wrong.

[stephenw10]

Me running on channel 5... Using 802.11b...

[johnpoz]

@stephenw10 said in pfSense as wireless AP transmit power adjustments?:

802.11b

hah - what like your bathroom scale or something.. I have seen those that still use B..

[JonathanLee]

@johnpoz I already moved to channel 1, it's much more fun.

[stephenw10]

@johnpoz said in pfSense as wireless AP transmit power adjustments?:

hah - what like your bathroom scale or something

Bunch of old thermostats. Should really change them out but....

[JonathanLee]

pfSense aka the "King Fisher 9000" Yacht

[johnpoz]

@JonathanLee what is that a printer right next to it.. Those are great for amplification of wifi ;)

Especially when their wifi is on ;)

[JonathanLee]

@johnpoz it's a printer. . . Oops

[JonathanLee]

ifconfig ath0_wlan0 txpower 40

this is the command to get out of 17% transmit power

[johnpoz]

@JonathanLee and users wonder why their wifi is problematic.. hahaha

[JonathanLee]

I found the best settings was wifi 802.11na and using -40 channel widths. It performs better than my apple airport Extreme. Whats weird is others in our area use 80 for channel widths on the 5ghz. My performance now with the 2100 is unreal. I didn't think it could do it. Movies streaming in a 3 bedroom house on different devices Xbox Nintendo switch etc iPad. It's running snort on wan and lan with AppID, squid and squid guard. I had to disable Clam AV to get my memory use down to 20-30 percent utilization. It is unreal it could be better than consumer grade equipment from that timeline now. It needed 802.11na not ng. Keep in mind my airport only ran wpa2 and with aes encryption options that thing was from 2009. I think the card dates to 2015 ish.

[provels]

@JonathanLee Weird, but whatever works. With ng I get a -40db signal, with na I get -70.

[stephenw10]

5Ghz is more easily attenuated by anything.

[JonathanLee]

@johnpoz
It is the same upstream.

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/pull/880

https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/14925

[provels]

@JonathanLee Is this the Compex or the Apple card? I have the Compex and my txpower was set at 30 by pfSense. Also, the "txpower 40" argument seems to have no effect, stays at 30 for me.
Maybe that's because you're using na and not ng. EDIT - Yeah, that's it.

[23.05.1-RELEASE][root@fw.workgroup]/root: ifconfig ath0_wlan0 txpower 40
[23.05.1-RELEASE][root@fw.workgroup]/root: ifconfig ath0_wlan0
ath0_wlan0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        description: ATH0_WLE200
        ether 04:f0:21:4f:6e:e3
        inet6 fe80::6f0:21ff:fe4f:6ee3%ath0_wlan0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x9
        groups: wlan
        ssid WIFI_LAN_nomap channel 11 (2462 MHz 11g ht/20) bssid 04:f0:21:4f:6e:e3
        regdomain FCC country US indoor ecm authmode WPA2/802.11i
        privacy MIXED deftxkey 3 AES-CCM 2:128-bit AES-CCM 3:128-bit
=>        txpower 30 scanvalid 60 pureg protmode OFF ampdulimit 64k
        ampdudensity 8 shortgi puren -ldpc -uapsd wme burst -apbridge
        dtimperiod 1 -dfs
        parent interface: ath0
        media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect mode 11ng <hostap>
        status: running
        nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>