On Tue, Apr 1, 2025 at 03:18 AM, G8HUL wrote:
Within radio range of each other.
Could you please be more specific ? Do you mean within radio range on the frequency they are supposed to operate on, at their set transmission power, through all obstacles that might be present ?
If so, it is not the case that all devices are within radio range.
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For example, it takes at least 4 APs to cover the indoors so that all 300 Wifi clients are able connect to Wifi. Many clients will still have low signal strength with just 4 APs. Outdoor clients have very marginal or no signal depending on AP placement. I used 6 APs for many years (5 NanoHD, 1 U6-Lite), but did not have any outdoor clients. I recently added 3 U6-LR. That has improved the coverage a lot. I am able to get all my Wifi devices to connect, but there are intermittent problems still with packet loss and disconnects, for some devices.
Only 2 of the APs are wired and the 7 others are meshed. They use two non-overlapping 80MHz non-DFS channels on the 5 GHz band for the backhaul. I have thought about wiring all the APs, but this will be expensive and unsightly as conduits would need to run outdoors for the Ethernet cables. I don't believe getting rid of the mesh backhaul would change much of anything given that 99% of the clients being 2.4 GHz IoT devices. The bandwidth utilization on the mesh backhaul is extremely low and is not the bottleneck Neither is the latency. However, because the APs are meshed, if I were to cut the power to some circuit breakers for testing purposes, the mesh would be broken and coverage would be reduced, unless all 9 APs were running on battery. Currently, only 2 of them are.
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Distant Z-Wave devices that go through several walls, especially more than 3 walls, also cannot connect directly to the controller. The only way they are able to connect is due to the of Z-Wave where each plug-in or hardwired device acts as a repeater. Again, if I were to cut off circuit breakers, the Z-Wave mesh would be broken, and many devices would be permanently unreachable, as opposed to intermittently.
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