Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “It Took MONTHS to Solve This WiFi Problem but I DID! (maybe… check pinned comment)”.
Lately I’ve been Mr unpopular around my house and I’m sure a lot of you can relate whether it’s buffering on the Mrs Netflix or a lag Spike on Junior’s game or an oh, so important. Video call that I can’t miss when there are problems with the Wi-Fi. The first thing that happens is – and the issue that’s plagued me for the last few months – turned out to be a doozy, see. I’Ve got these speakers in my family room that use a standard called wireless audio specification 4.0, which isn’t Wi-Fi, but it uses the same Spectrum as Wi-Fi, meaning that it is susceptible to the same kind of interference and because it streams, high bitrate audio with very low Latency, any small amount of interference can sound a little something like this. We lost everything whole family movie, night ruined.
Thankfully we got to the bottom of it. You guys are never gon na believe what was spewing RF interference out into my house and, as you come along with me on this journey of Discovery, I am sure you’re gon na pick up some tips and tricks. That’Ll. Take you from Wi-Fi zero to Wi-Fi hero. All we need is a little bit of help from the contents of this pouch and from our sponsor, see Sonic if you’re in need of a power supply. Look no further see. Sonic offers high quality power supplies with a variety of options for any build, learn more at csonic.com foreign, like any other problem these days. The first thing we did was Google it to see if anyone else was experiencing the same issue and we came across an owner’s thread over on AVS Forum, with over 400 Pages, which is either a really good sign or a really bad one, and as it turns Out it is chock full of users complaining about exactly the same audio, cutouts and stuttering that I’m experiencing here at home.
The good news is that thread was full of useful information that ultimately set us down the right path. Sony’S hta9s, like any other wireless device, are not truly Wireless. I mean they’ve got a wires coming out of them right here, so that they can be powered by the wall, but they receive their audio stream wirelessly rather than through a traditional speaker wire. They use the same five gigahertz Spectrum as the Wi-Fi devices in your home, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, five gigahertz Wi-Fi is great for high bandwidth communication, so the audio quality from these things, it’s actually great. The problem is that, while five gigahertz was really clear back when it came out, it was the perfect way to get away from all the interference in the 2.4 gigahertz bands. These days, almost everything that’s using Wi-Fi in your house is going to be on five gigahertz, which means well, you see a lot of the same problems. Of course we don’t know yet that that’s the problem, so one of our first troubleshooting steps is to find out what the Wi-Fi environment around us looks like, and you can do that with one of those Wi-Fi analyzer phone apps that are often available for free. These will show you visually what ssids or wireless networks are around you: what channels they’re occupying and their relative strength, as measured by your phone’s antenna? They are super handy and what we’re looking for is an unnamed SSID that could be being transmitted by our Sony transmission box here, and I think we’ve got it. There’S some weaker signals from my outdoor access point, but there’s this really strong one, I’m right here. Next to it that pops up once in a while and then goes away called hidden SSID, could it be as simple as just taking the rest of my Wi-Fi network and moving everything off of those channels. Here in my wireless dashboard, you can see a lot of the diagnosis, for this happened on a completely different day when that hidden network was occupying different channels that I was trying to clear out, so we’re still going to go through the process for you guys.
Let’S go ahead and just wipe out everything in that range and okay, theoretically, you clear out the channels should be crystal clear right, yes, but only temporarily within a couple of days. The issue was back. Why? Because that hidden SSID had jumped to a completely different Channel but believe it or not, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature because most people are going to have all of their wireless devices configured to automatically select the best Channel. Well, they actually all end up hopping around depending on what else is going on in the environment around you so Sony in their wisdom, has the ability to say hey, that’s not quite working for me.
I’M gon na sit here and standby and passively scan, which channel is most free and imma jump on to that. So the next time you power me up, I’m gon na be good to go, and, unfortunately, while you can disable that channel hopping, if you want to manually, manage all of your channels, there’s no way to tell it which channel you want it to stay on Sony. Let me pick it and then I could have solved this problem because, as it turns out, even if you disable it. If, for whatever reason, the unit loses power, it could automatically select a different one, and then you got ta go back on the dashboard again and the sides, as it turned out, even with this set manually to a separate channel for my Wi-Fi.
The problem wasn’t solved anyway, it’s time to bring out the big guns or about small but effective guns, which is totally a thing. This is the Y spy and long time viewers will have seen something like it before it’s a spectrum analyzer which combined with meta Geeks software, allows us to see in real time any legitimate traffic or unwanted interference across both the 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz spectrums. I went with this because I’m familiar with the software already, but you don’t have to for as little as 20 bucks. You can get yourself set up with an SDR or software-defined radio that, with often free software, can be used to do anything from Wi-Fi analysis like we’re doing today to amateur radio, to building your own gsm network and so on and so forth. They’Re super cool and we’re going to put some learning resources in the video description down below. For now, though, let’s compare what we see in metageek software chat analyzer and what we see in our free cell phone app.
Our ssids have very similar relative strengths and positioning in the different five gigahertz channels, but what we can’t see in here is all the traffic and there it is our unknown SSID with a whole bunch of traffic. This is color coded according to the intensity, so blue would be the lightest red would be the most intense, and this is all yellow. With a spot of orange. Here’S the thing about Wi-Fi it can transmit over top of this kind of background noise, but it’s slow and it’s unreliable.
So what Wi-Fi devices are designed to do is wait their turn nicely in order to optimize their use of the available Spectrum. That’S one of the reasons that you always want to make sure that you Center your 2.4 gigahertz networks over 1, 6 and 12, rather than using the in-betweens, which will just cause unnecessary interference, making them not play with each other nicely. But because this is wireless audio. There’S no such thing as waiting to send a packet.
You don’t have a ton of time to buffer data, because otherwise the user is going to notice the audio and the video being out of sync. So we pretty much can’t use any channel that the hta9 is occupying, and yet it went and it picked channels that have ssids on them, or so I thought I’ve never been so disappointed to have something working perfectly because here’s the thing, even though those ssids are Broadcasting on the same channel as the Sony audio system well you’re, not actually transmitting any data unless you’re doing giant file copies, so it turns out that wasn’t even the problem. Thankfully, when you step up your game to one of these antennas, you can identify interference from all kinds of different non-wifi devices. Meta geek actually provides this really helpful little graphic to show you what signatures of different interfering devices might look like. They don’t include a microwave, but that’s okay.
I can show you that we’re on 2.4 gigahertz ever had your Bluetooth headphones cut out when you’re trying to microwave something in the kitchen. Well, I’m gon na show you guys why see this waterfall over time? It goes from traffic on the established 2.4 gigahertz channels to this is a good opportunity to show you guys why that’s not a problem for five gigahertz, though look at that nothing. Well, we know there’s something we just got ta find it.
This is the point in the video where things start to look a little more like a ghost hunting reality show than Tech tips, but I swear to you what I’m doing is legit. We found the best results are from wrapping the entire y spy box and then making ourselves kind of a cone around the antenna. In this way, we can turn our omnidirectional antenna into a directional antenna which is going to make it a lot easier for us to Zone in on smaller sources of interference. Now I already alluded to there being some movie Magic in this article.
We absolutely nailed it yesterday we found it. We screen capped it. It was a fluke, I don’t think we’re gon na get it again, but we’re gon na give it a shot and, failing that we’ll show you guys the recorded footage. Let’S go for the doubters that I’m sure are out there. Yes, our directional antenna does work. You can tell because when I point it at our source of interference, rather than away from it boom, look at it light up cool right, then watch I’m gon na turn.
It around and that red zone is going to go away. Of course, this is not a very granular tool in its current form, but we can fix that because we’re specifically looking for devices that are interfering with our wireless audio setup. We only care about this narrow Little slice of spectrum right here, we’re going to use a feature in this software called device finder. So we’re focusing on this and basically we’re gon na go around and look for problematic spikes. That’S not the cat! Oh oh! We did actually get a little Spike there. Hello, okay, Christmas interferes.
Oh uh guys can you it wasn’t Christmas. The kids turned the TV back on and the TV’s over there. Chris. The Christmas tree is clean. Oh interesting, this is sending out pulses printers.
Oh, we have some Z-Wave lights. I got a little blip. Really.
Anything that plugs in is a possibility. Smart thermostats, smart lights. I know I told these to use the 2.4 gigahertz Network. Oh, oh there’s something going on here. This is so far away from the family. Room, though see the thing about five gigahertz is that it’s limited transmission range can actually again be a feature rather than a bug, because it’s much less likely to interfere with another device.
That’S far away, even if your Wi-Fi reception might not be as good as it was on 2.4. This is quite substantial, though wait even after I walked away. I was getting these spikes yeah. These Govi smart lights are definitely kicking off five gigahertz.
Oh, we are getting all kinds of interference in the mechanical room. I don’t know that it’s from these guys, specifically because what’s interesting is when I move back a little bit all of a sudden, it’s all over the plow. No, that’s really because calm down a little bit, Whaler Bueller, you know what it is. I know why there’s so much in here come on over here, Brandon yeah! Oh, that’s, spicy! I know why there’s so much in here.
It is what you found yesterday. It looks like the issue is my Z-Wave Network, as I walk into the room and Trigger motion from my Z-Wave switches. Yep there we go, look at them go. Oh man, that’s why it’s so hard to nail down where the interference is coming from, because I’ve got a hundred of these bloody things all over my house to be clear.
It may not actually be jasco’s fault. Specifically, I had some really weird Z-Wave issues recently that I was diagnosing with one of the developers of z-wave.js for home assistant, where he said – and this is a direct quote – I haven’t seen some of these log messages before and I’ve seen a lot of logs. So it could be these devices, but it could also be some of the other Z-Wave devices on my network that are causing, in particular, some really sticky, non-optimal routing. That means there’s a lot of hops going around anytime anything’s happening on the network.
We managed to resolve it enough temporarily that I’m able to actually configure devices, but it’s clear that it’s an ongoing issue that I need to resolve with my Z-Wave devices. So the good news is that I know what the problem is, but the bad news is that the long-term solution is probably an upcoming switch from in a valley that doesn’t even exist yet or maybe even going all the way back to dumb switches for now kids. I think you’re stuck with bad audio, sometimes up here. Can you maybe use the theater instead yeah, you don’t want to you just, but you don’t like the theater.
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Your first 30 days free, no credit card required at freshbooks.com Linus, step away from the number crunching and get back to taking care of business. It’S possible that six gigahertz Wi-Fi is going to alleviate some of these issues. For those of you who don’t know, six gigahertz Wi-Fi is opening up more Spectrum to Wi-Fi so that there’s going to be less congestion, but flip side is that as soon as you open up that spectrum and everybody like piles into it, you’re bound to run into These sort of problems yet uh again, if you guys enjoyed this video, who knows maybe you’d, enjoy the original video. I did taking a much more in-depth look at the Y spy and channelizer softwares from like seven years ago, or something .