Hi,
I just installed my new 7259 Gateway and originally planned to put it on the attic. I configured the Gateway as a WiFi client (2.4 GHz) and installed everything about 5m away from my WiFi router. After finishing and closing the attic door I noticed that I do have a very bad to none connectivity to the Gateway.
I experiences the following:
- Very bad connectivity to the Gateway. WiFi is only available for a relatively short range.
- Duplicate ping responses and packet loss!
Overall it was not usable.
When I go nearer to my access point the ping duplicates get rare and the connectivity is fine. I also tested this with 2 other RAK Gateways and the results are the same: Even in very short distances I get a bad WiFi performance and connection problems.
So I digged deeper into the openWRT and found the following which might help to diagnose this problem:
- The regional settings for the interface seems to be set to “TW” which might be suboptimal
- iwconfig showed me that “txpower” is 13dBm only. According to the specs the WiFi card should support 20dBm. I tried to set this to 20 but this is not supported by the driver
- I opened one Gateway and checked if the WiFi antenna is connected: it was, everything fine here.
So here are my questions:
- Does anyone else has these problems? I can confirm this for at least 3 gateways I bought.
- Is there any chance to fix this problem or has someone managed to use a USB WiFi interface for better connectivity?
I also found out that the AP has to be left enabled to use the Gateway as a WiFi client but this seems to be a software configuration bug as it is possible to set it via commandline to “sta” only and everything works fine. This would be nice if this could be fixed with the next firmware update.
Hoping for help, Sebastian