Gadgetory

what's up guys Jays $0.02 here we're going to tackle a topic today at one that I definitely need to address in my new home here and that is wireless networks most people are not fortunate enough to live in a home that has a pre-wired network because that's something that started around the early 2000s now although I'm fortunate enough to have that in this new house I still need to have a reliable wireless network and because of the arrangement of this house the wireless access point is quite a distance from some of the living space in the house and I thought this would make a good video to show you how to get the most out of your wireless network using free tools that I have used for quite a while now I've actually used these this tool I'm going to show you today for years with its specifically tuned copper base and maintenance free plug and play operation the EVGA 980ti hybrid offers ultra-fast gaming performance at the lowest temperatures possible click the link in the description for more details now even if you do have pre red network cable in your home or you ran it to the rooms that you have your computers in it's still good to have a wireless network because of your wireless devices you know you've got your tablets you've got your smart phones your laptops and you don't want to be tethered down to a wire if you don't have to be and with wireless networking getting much faster you know a be in the beginning and the G was the and then wireless n was like oh my god and now wireless AC is just that much big bigger badder and faster with better coverage you should have a wireless network in your home and not to mention most of our routers have wireless capabilities and 9 SPS they're sending modems now that help built-in wireless AC in them as well so why not at least get the most out of it especially if it's already there now just fair warning this is going to be a multi-part video I'm going to try and fit it into but it might need three depending on how this goes the first thing I'm going to show you in today's video is how to analyze your Wi-Fi how to find your dead spots and how to adjust your radio so that you can get the best signal when it comes to your wireless most routers you can just set to auto and it will auto set its signal but as things progress and people open up new wireless networks in your neighborhood signals might start to get jammed up and the auto isn't always going to change itself so I figured today we will go ahead and show you how to change the radio and how to find the best channel now one of the other things I'm going to be doing with the video as I move forward into the next part is going to be how to extend your wireless network how to add access points that will extend your wireless so that regardless of where you go it will just handoff to whatever the strongest signal is and then the next part is going to be getting Network down into my builder space or my as Jerry calls his makerspace but for me it's gonna be my my nerd space I guess is how I'm going to get wireless down in there because there is no wired cat5 in there and I'm not going to be adding a wired cat5 in there because I don't feel like sneaking things through the walls so I'm going to be doing a wireless bridge into there with obviously a built in hub in the router and because it's not going to be my main workspace I can get away with the wireless not to mention with wireless AC being all the way up to what thirteen hundred megabit per second it's more than enough and we'll talk about that at that video at that time but anyway today's tool I'm going to be using is free for anyone with an Android device unfortunately at least at the time of making this video this app Wi-Fi analyzer is not available on iOS devices but if you have an Android tablet or an Android phone it's free head on over to the Play a google play download it I've used it for years and it's going to work absolute wonders for getting your wireless set up so what I'm gonna do now is I'm literally going to walk around the house with the camera showing you how the app works showing you how to identify your dead spots so that you can try to figure out where you want to either move your router to or add an access point if that's the route you're going to go now just to recap the reason why I'm doing this video is here is my Nighthawk x6 which is my router and wireless access point but I actually never showed you guys what this looked like after it was all wired up not too bad but anyway this is on one extreme end of the house and the problem with that is the other extreme end is going to get signal degradation because of all the walls in between it Plus this is on the second floor and if you're on the far end of the house on the first floor then you definitely aren't going to be getting the full benefit of your wireless okay so the app I'm using here is called Wi-Fi analyzer when you open it up you've got a kind of a menu here with a bunch of different views that you can use the main view you probably use here is channel graph this is going to kind of give you an idea if all the wireless networks in your area as you can see we've got quite a few going on here especially when you're on the upstairs of a two-story house because you get better reception the higher up that you go so this wireless 24 gigahertz are technically 2.4 but you can't use a decimal point in the SSID that is my Wireless right there and I've also got another one wireless 5 gigahertz that is not going as for some reason not showing up but anyways I do have a wireless 5 gigahertz on here maybe this device isn't 5 gigahertz capable I really don't know view you've also got your time graph this is kind of showing you over time what the signal has been like so if you wanted to keep this thing stationary in one area and let it run you could see if your signal is kind of dipping down and coming up and dip and down you've got here channel rating this is showing you a rating of stars the quality of the channels that are available so as you can see it's got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 stars so you can see channels 2 through 9 right here it's saying or just completely cluttered don't bother using them you can see Channel 10 11 and 12 right here have the best signal 12 11 and 12 being the absolute best access point list right here this is showing you the actual radio signal strength of DBM here so you can see channel 5 which is what I'm on right now 2 point 4 3 2 megahertz is getting a minus 42 it's actually pretty good because I'm very close to the router the router is actually on that side of the wall right there so I'm really close to it you can see all the wireless networks in your area based on signal strength one of the other views which I just went to here is signal meter this is one we be using here it's also got a sound which is really kind of annoying at the beeping sound that will speed up or slow down based on signal strength and then you this is right here where you'll touch and select the wireless that you want to check the rating on as you can see again my wireless right here because I'm only about oh I don't know 8 feet from it with one wall in between us is very very strong if I turn on the beeping sound again you'll hear it's going to beep really fast so we're going to do now is we're literally going to walk around the house and kind of document where our strong signal is and where our weak signal is because that's what we want to try and fix here is the weakness in various dead spots of the house now there's lots of things that can actually cause interference with your wireless especially 2.4 gigahertz it's a very cluttered spectrum there's lots of wireless routers on there what cordless phones just all sort it's like the old 800 megahertz was back when you had the original cordless phones it just was super cluttered cellphones were using 800 megahertz so then everything went to 2.4 and now it's cluttered and everything's moving up to 5 gigahertz so you can kind of see a pattern there so here's the upstairs family room and like I said on the other side of that wall right there is whether Wireless is so I would expect this room to obviously be pretty good also please ignore the mess we are still moving so we're going to do now is we're just going to stay on the upstairs here we are going to walk back towards the bedrooms and see what kind of signal we're getting over here here is the office which I very bright room huh which I expect to be pretty good yeah we're still well up in the green not too concerned about that move back here to where the kids bedrooms are and as you can see we're actually not getting too much degradation this is little Jays room right here we are now about as far as we are going to be able to get from the router and you can see we're still up in the green it's not too bad but one of the things I did for this video is I put myself on channel 5 which is cluttered and I want to compare it once I move it to a less cluttered Channel so you can see right about here we dip down into the yellow not too bad though could be worse I'm actually going to attempt to navigate the stairs while holding the meter if I fall down it would make a pretty epic video I'm sure so as we come down stairs here the TV's still on let's take care of that okay so here we are in the downstairs family room as I pretty much expect it we've got full full signal because we are literally right under it the wireless is right up there so because we are literally right underneath it I expected the signal to be fantastic which it is and I was kind of curious as to how it would be you know with the floor between us and some electrical wiring here with the overhead lighting so let's go ahead and head here to the far side of the house and see if we start to get any real degradation so here is the dining room you can see we're dropping here a little bit it's going to start to drop a little bit more rapidly as we get to the far side of the house where the playroom is and that sort of stuff still looking green though it's actually not as bad as I thought it was going to be it's really not dropped down to the right on the border there let's go over here to the office what's going to be a front office that I have not even begun to get everything put together but you can see it's really not that bad so let's do this then let's go into a speed test and let's compare alright so I started up speed test here on the old iDevice and so far it's stuck on finding the best server yeah that's never a good sign anyway let's see how we're going to do here in the farthest point away from the router and although we are getting a good signal according to the Wi-Fi analyzer as you can see right there you can see that signal is only part of the story if that signal is got a ton of other things being completely what's the word I'm looking for here it's being completely garbled by other radios stomping on top of each other on the same channel then you get this this is what appears to be a good connection however it is a dead spot really bad one okay now let me show you guys what I mean here if I now open up the app back in the kitchen because we're right under the wireless ban it picked it up with no problem whatsoever so if I begin the test you'll see we'll get some pretty good speed here it's preparing here it's going to test our ping it's not acting funky at all and you can see now we're getting no 33 on the wireless now watch as we start to walk away do this you can see the degradation just do to do to do to do falling falling stuck at 14 at the moment okay see now watch the upload see back in the dead spot here we have what it appears to be good signal but as we walk back over here watch what happens wait for it Oh failed so test again alright let's walk away and you can see it just draw up and off like that look at that so we have I clearly identified a coverage issue here now if the upload still works right here nope it's not working upload isn't working let's walk closer to the kitchen okay mine you can do it you can do it Oh see it failed again but now watch if I don't move you'll see everything's going to work just fine now we go to speed see that and the upload huh it's not as fast as I used to get but you could see I'm getting it so how do we fix that well once again we bring out our handy-dandy signal tool now here's the thing you might be going but I got good signal which could lead a lot of you to be blaming your ISPs thinking we're getting terrible service I've got good wireless but the ISP keeps dropping well no what you have here is a strong signal that's being completely stomped on by other 2.4 wireless that is mixed messing up your your actual data being sent to your device from your router it's kind of like when you have your in range of two different radio stations in the car at the same time and they start kind of walking on top of each other that's what's happening here so let's go ahead and do this then we're going to go to our view we're going to go to channel graph well look at that we've only got one router chillin over there but as you can see right here my router has about the same signal strength as three other routers in the area they cease the net year and the summer so these three right here are what's causing me the problem but you can see we've got a lot less going on over here on the right so let's go move the channel let's move it over to channel like 11 or 12 and let's see what happens we'll rerun the test okay so now as you can see I move my router over to here and to do that you just have to go into your routers wireless settings and change the radio of channel for your router so you're going to have to go into your own manual and figure out how to do that now something important to point out here is I want you to notice that our signal strength is a little lower than it was before we change the channel now here we are in the same room same router all we did was change the channel if we open up speed test now you can see like that immediately it recognizes the server and gives me the begin test option now that's already better than we were getting before because we couldn't even get the app to recognize that it was online let alone actually start a test so now for ping we're getting nineteen and yet we're not getting the greatest signal here we're still only getting what five megabits of my 60 and it's dropping off a little bit down into four and a half back up to five but the important point here is that by doing nothing but changing the channel we were able to get a good signal because we don't have all those routers stomping on each other so there you go so you can see we're now connected in this room which before we had nothing nothing whatsoever and we didn't change the location of the router at all so it's going to talk about this now there's a few things you can take away from this video one there's no replacement for having a properly placed wireless access point and in this house that would have been probably in this office because it's very centralized above the middle of the house and as high as it can possibly get now if you're like me where you're kind of stuck where the placement of the patch panel in the house was poorly placed in the master bedroom closet which a lot of them seemed to be then you're kind of stuck with mounting it over there now sure I could have turned one of those leads into this office into basically a feed to the router and then had it basically another feed going back to the patch panel but that would have been a nightmare because none of these rooms actually have two Ethernet running to it like a lot of newer houses do this one only has one going to each room so that wasn't going to be possible so the next thing that you could do to fix this problem is add a second access point now there's a lot of access points that are available out there very easy to set up things like ubiquity have power over ethernet where you literally just plug the damn thing in and that's it it's it's it's easy to set up and it you can place them all over your house and have literal no dead spots and I would like to do something like that in the future but for right now I do have the asrock gaming router the wireless AC 3200 router where I'm going to be hooking that up on the other end of the house which again is not necessarily the most ideal having one access point on one extreme and the other on the opposite end maybe I'll put it in this office that might actually work because I do need a switch in here and we'll kind of see how well that works but the nice thing about having the wired ethernet in the house like this is that I can move it around and see where it gets the best coverage so apps like this can help you at least identify where your dead spots are when it comes to your wireless because as I showed you can show that you have strong signal but it doesn't mean you have good data transfer it's being completely stepped on by all of those other routers so if you've been dealing with good connectivity but poor speeds for your wireless there's lots of things that could be interfering use an app like this identify other networks in your neighborhood you might be surprised just how many there are this house by itself is running three wireless networks it's got a dual five gigahertz radio band as well as a 2.4 gigahertz but at least if you can identify what's happening and change your channel of your wireless you have a good chance of at least getting some of the dead spots with ok connectivity when it comes to data and then adding other access points or moving your router you can also use this app to move your router and find the best location for your wireless I hope this videos helped you guys it's something I've always struggled with with dead spots in homes and stuff and I've always used this app I've used it at work when you're setting up wireless and offices when I worked in IT it is free not sponsored this is just an app I've always used and I think it's fantastic unfortunately not available on Apple like I said Google Play is your only option anyway guys tell me what you think let others know your tips and tricks when it comes to setting up your wireless access points and as always guys I want your suggestions on the types of videos you want me to cover because if it pertains to you it pertains to somebody else and it could be beneficial for the masses alright guys time to get out of here thanks for watching and I will see you in the next J's 2 cents video