Joel Crane is our special guest on CTS and he has a lot of knowledge bombs on spectrum analysis. Be sure to listen to this episode.
Interference. The invisible killer of your spectrum. It creates a terrible user experience and your network is to blame for it. Spectrum analysis is how you’re going to identify what is kicking your Wi-Fi to the side.
I’ve used this process to find issues the users are experiencing. Often times the fault is placed on the WLAN but it is either done unintentionally or on purpose. You will usually find out that there is a misbehaving device or a consumer level hardware causing issues with the WLAN.
In this episode, Rowell and François ask Joel Crane questions about what spectrum analysis is and why is it useful.
Spectrum Analysis with Joel Crane
- Detecting, identifying, and locating non-WiFi interference
- Gauging co-channel/adjacent interference
- Who uses it
- Cool stuff to know about
- The troubleshooting process
- Duty cycle vs. utilization
- Real-time FFT vs Swept-Tuned
Resources Mentioned
Sample Spectrum Captures
Great podcast and very good information about spectrum analysis. Congratulations! By the way, those samples for common interference sources are awesome and really useful during troubleshooting, so… I’m wondering how LTE-U signals (alone or plus Wi-Fi signal) will look like in spectrum analyzers (since some USA carriers will soon transmit data on 5 GHz band)…
Maximo,
Thanks for listening to the show! I think as we begin seeing LTE-U in the wild we should be able to see what that looks like on the spectrum.
Personally, I haven’t seen it yet.
We saw LTE-U in the wild at Mobile World Congress in Spain (around 2015). Sadly, our team there wasn’t able to get a recording, but it basically looked like an OFDM signature with heavy utilization, and not was wide and not centered on an 802.11 channel.
I’m curious if it’s heavy utilization with or without calls.