Good easy to follow tutorial; especially as many people below about 35 increasingly rarely encounter analogue radio equipment and have not had to do such things as attach wire coat hangers to transistor radio antennas in order to listen to pirates (and still put the set in a far corner of an upstairs room).
if you wanted to talk to people you used a CB radio which had an antenna often 1,5 to 3m tall – this had to be in exactly the right place and size; otherwise the standing waves fed back along the cable and either blew up the end stage of the transmitter (as it overheated) or caused interference to TV sets across the street.
The app they are plugging which appears to have been coded by a British lad does at least show the correct radiation pattern for a UHF digital signal which isn’t a simple horizontal circle but more like a flower, and in between these “petals” of the “pretty flower” there is jack shit signal.
Unfortunately 2,4 GHz is way crowded today and near unusable, made worse by Talk Talk seeminly setting their routers up out of the box with skewed channel centering (I assume both in my neighbourhood have not had their settings changed as normally anyone who knows how to do this changes the SSID). I blanked out parts of the standard SSIDs to protect privacy of my neighbours as these can often give clues to hackers!
ZA-RTR09 is one of my SSIDs. It appears twice as my router has 2,4 GHz WLAN but the RF stage isn’t very good so I had to put a repeater downstairs. They just about co-exist and work on Channel 6 – I didn’t want to hog channel 11 as well as that would be taking the piss (BTW this one is also where all the microwaves usually end up cutting across).
There is loads of other stuff on 2,4 GHz, including Bluetooth, cordless keyboards/mouses/headsets for gaming, kids toy aircraft etc which can and does cut across wireless on this band.
5 GHz is usually less congested but the signal does not go as far. I am unsure why the monitoring software (Vistumbler) I used has that big gap in the middle; the graph may have been coded by an American so leaves out the channels the weather radar appears on; although in Europe it finds its way onto the seemingly clear ones at the top and you then get your access point knocked back to the lower bit of the band for 10 minutes. I will have to read that document the Ofcom man sent me yet again to remind myself where the UK and EU allocations are….
