I’d say you’re most likely having interference problems.  With the amount of 2.4g congestion in the public spectrum these days as well as the consumer available telephony devices available it’s not overly surprising. 

One thing to think about is the pattern of your traffic habits.  In our experience a marginal signal wireless link combined with large upload volumes leads to major packet loss due to the amount of packet resends the AP has to handle.

I wouldn’t think that weather patterns would affect the link to that extent, we’ve got 5.8g (less tolerant of physical obstruction) wireless links running 50+ km’s which aren’t adversely affected by weather conditions including heavy fog, driving rain and high temperature.

The only problems we’ve had with high temperature are inside outdoor cabinets where the temperature reaches 35+ degrees.

As far as 2.4g alignment is concerned, I’d doubt that you would have problems with temperature buckling an antenna mount.

And as for tides:  we’ve got 20+ km 2.4g and even a 90 – 100k 5.8g link running over tidal water and have yet to prove / disprove that tides adversely effect RSSI on either band despite a considerable amount of resources invested.  We have discovered RSSI fluctuations in said links but the patterns don’t match the tidal flow.

All in all I’d probably inform the admin of the AP about the situation.

My 5c (Long live the 5c)

Tim Price

thepacific.net

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From: Michael Davies [mailto:michael@hereisasite.co.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, 1 August 2006 3:48 p.m.
To: nznog@list.waikato.ac.nz
Subject: [nznog] Wireless link adversly affected by the sun?

Hi there,

As the subject suggests, I’ve been noticing an interesting problem with our internet. We’re lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a wireless net connection running through Trango broadband hardware, fairly conventional wireless tech. However I’ve noticed through monitoring the connection with smokeping to various places around the country that the connection quality seems to decrease dramatically through the middle of the day, but not every day. At first I thought that this was simply related to congestion somewhere, but from following the weather a bit I’ve started noticing that it gets worse on the nice sunny days.

For example: Today, a balmy 17 degrees in Dunedin and beautifully sunny all day. Packet loss and jitter begins to increase at about 9am and peaks about 1pm with 60% loss, then at 2pm as if flicking a switch it returns to nearly 0% loss. From looking at the graphs over time, this does happen quite often but not every day and the loss today is definitely the worst I’ve seen it (but also the warmest/sunniest day we’ve had in Dunedin for quite a while).

Has anyone seen or heard of this happening before? Would there be any way to prevent this – supposing that the sun is the culprit – short of installing a Mr. Burns type sun shield?

Regards,

Michael