pfSense as wireless AP transmit power adjustments?

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>

JonathanLee

@provels

@provels Take a look at this file with the built in editor in pfsense GUI

Screenshot 2023-10-31 at 7.49.01 AM.png

This may have blocked you from turning it up. It might be limited by way of this file. . .

Scroll down and find WiFi 11g and check for something called max power