So - if you read the diatribe about my wireless network last week, you're probably desperate to know how it went. Or possibly not. Either way, I'm going to tell you about it, so if you're squeamish about technical matters, look away now.
This is a Spectrum Analyser. This is what serious Ofcom interference jockeys whip out from their jacket pocket at the first sniff of dubious transmission - which is what the very nice Les did when he turned up at my house. ('Jacket pocket' is somewhat metaphorical, it's about the size of a cereal packet, albeit dwarfed by some of the aerials that Les carted in a bit later). Les sniggered a bit at my suggestion that one of these will set you back about £500; I now understand that a very, very cheap one of these will set you back about £500 and a proper one starts at about 10 times as much.
So I spent a very pleasant hour and a half with Les, chewing the fat about the issue whilst he waved expensive bits of kit about. And he detected absolutely nothing that might be causing the problem, which didn't appear to be an issue all the time he was here, frustratingly - the network connection had dropped three times in the morning before he came. He did comment that it was odd the way the signal appeared to weaken at the back of the house so dramatically - but, whatever the cause of that, it's not something transmitting locally.
So I spent a very pleasant hour and a half with Les, chewing the fat about the issue whilst he waved expensive bits of kit about. And he detected absolutely nothing that might be causing the problem, which didn't appear to be an issue all the time he was here, frustratingly - the network connection had dropped three times in the morning before he came. He did comment that it was odd the way the signal appeared to weaken at the back of the house so dramatically - but, whatever the cause of that, it's not something transmitting locally.
All very frustrating. Les has gone off to write up his initial findings and I undertook to see if I could get some better measures of when the problem occurs, although I'm not conscious of particular times being worse than any other. To that end, I spent a bit of time on Sunday* setting up some network monitoring doobrey and am playing around with some measures of reachability for the devices on the network alongside timing scheduled downloads across the network. The latter is surprisingly tricky to get a handle on: A few years ago I'd probably have written some code to collect data based on transfer of a file from the NAS in the attic but that's not really an option any more, seeing as how I've forgotten to write anything more useful than the occasional batch script and I'm not resurrecting my skills just for that. Found a cut-down edition of PRTG that might give me some clues for free, so I'll see what that tells me in the next couple of weeks. And if it doesn't tell me anything that looks useful, I may just give up and wire the house up more robustly. You lot will have to watch this space for a bit longer.
* I had to do it all again on Monday, on account of the hitherto reliable Windows 7 OS going into meltdown on the kitchen laptop. Which absorbed most of my Sunday and is going to be the subject of a later post entirely to vent my annoyance and help me calm down. I don't care if you're interested.
* I had to do it all again on Monday, on account of the hitherto reliable Windows 7 OS going into meltdown on the kitchen laptop. Which absorbed most of my Sunday and is going to be the subject of a later post entirely to vent my annoyance and help me calm down. I don't care if you're interested.
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