inSSIDer signal strength peaks and valleys Belkin N750DB

[Bard]

I have a Belkin N750DB and a Zyxel X-550 hooked up to it as an access point. When running inSSIDer, the signal strength spikes and drops every minute and a half. I'm not sure how it is supposed to look but spikes seem bad.

It's only picking up my devices so the area is not crowded, for wi-fi anyways. Only running the 2.4 GHz radio, 20MHz band. The channels are 1 for the AP and 11 for the router. Router and AP are ~10' apart. I have a legacy G printer that connects to the AP. LAN Speed Test tells me I average 31.5Mbps write and 21.4 read. Been having small periods of time, 30seconds-1min, where I lose my connection.

Do the signal strength or LAN speeds indicate I may have issues?

 

[rhombus]

The inSSIDer graphs should look like the screenshot on its website, and you should not have regular disconnects lasting for over 30 seconds. It looks like there's a serious problem, I'm surprised it's working at all.

inSSIDer does not show hidden SSIDs - it's useful, but it really should not be relied on for detecting other wireless networks, or for selecting a channel.

If you can try inSSIDer on a totally different client and computer, with everything else on the network including the printer unplugged, that would help diagnose the problem. Try with just the Belkin only, and then with just the Zyxel only (configured as a wireless router). Position the routers on a desk and away from boundaries and corners, set them to Auto channel, and keep the client a few metres away in the same room.

 

[thiggins]

What traffic is running on your wireless network while you are looking at inSSIDer? You need steady traffic (large file transfer, video stream) to produce a steady plot.

 

[StratmanX]

What version of inSSIDER are you using? Is this on a PC or a Mac?

The screenshot you posted looks sufficiently unfamiliar to make me think you are either not using a current version, a beta, maybe a Mac version (I use a PC), you have tapped into hidden settings I cannot find, or it is due to using another router as an AP.

Are you cropping the screen image a good deal? Some of the headings I expect to see are not there. If I knew what your issue was then this would not be a potential issue. Since I don't, I want to see all the screen, not bits and pieces.

My inSSIDer Time Graph is in units of minutes and each point on the X axis is more spread apart than in your image. Also, the graphing is a continuous line tracing, not a discrete peak returning to baseline for each plot of data.

The RSSI of -100, shown in the top right area of your screenshot, does not correlate to the peaks in your screenshot, though it does correspond to the valleys. This is the inverse of what you expect inSSIDER to record as the RSSI.

My suggestion is to turn off your AP and just check the wireless router function using inSSIDER. If inSSIDER functions as anticipated then the issue is with your AP, though I am unsure how at this point. For all I know, maybe this is what inSSIDER is supposed to look like with your specific wireless router and AP setup.

One other suggestion is to add to the above is to also turn off all other clients when testing your wireless router and a single client (a notebook running inSSIDer). You can then begin to add other clients one at a time while checking inSSIDER to see for issues cause by another client or the AP on your LAN. The idea is to isolate what is causing inSSIDer to function in a seemingly strange way.

Lastly, if your LAN is working to your satisfaction, who cares what inSSIDER reports. Use something else to obtain signal intensities and identify neighbor's broadcasted SSID's.

 

[StratmanX]

What traffic is running on your wireless network while you are looking at inSSIDer? You need steady traffic (large file transfer, video stream) to produce a steady plot.

Running inSSIDer by itself is enough to produce the graph seen in rhombus' linked image. No other traffic need occur.

However, I also wonder if some application running simultaneously when the OP was using inSSIDer may have caused the weird graphing.

 

[Bard]

Odd, I subscribed to this thread but I never received any emails about replies.

Well, it's been working much better as of late. The only thing I have done differently is remove a PCI wireless card that I had just disabled through device manager before; I am using USB adapters for my PC's.

The screenshot I posted was from version 1 of inSSIDer. I don't get the same spikes with version 2, although it is limited to a 5 minute window for the time graph instead of ~45 minutes for version 1. I ran version 2 while also running LAN Speed Test and nothing looked out of the ordinary.

I'm not sure what was happening, things just started crapping out for me for a couple of days. It was just my PC though, and it was an unusual event, things have been running well for the most part since I got the belkin router. I may get a Belkin N600DB adapter even though the 5Ghz band didn't have much oomph according the the review. I am using a pretty basic Airlink 101 Golden N adapter now.

Thanks for the quick replies. Hopefully this was just a fluke and won't occur too often.

 

[sfx2000]

It's been my experience that Inssider (the application) spikes from time to time - not sure if this is the application, or the driver software on the host PC... in any event, it's not the AP's that are being reported

(I've seen +20dB spikes on reported AP's - no way in hell that an AP would be that unstable)