It seems that some mixer manufacturers recently are bound and determined to include a critical link of equipment control to outdated and poor performing internal units. This holds true at least for both the Music Tribe and now Mackie products. Both the XR/MR series and more recently the DL16/32S series suffer from this problem. Prior units such as the DL1608/806 and the DL32R from Mackie and the X32 Series from Behringer had no embedded WiFi units and as such left this choice to the user. They would have been better off leaving this aspect to companies whose business depends on reliable equipment by simply providing information on tested units in conjunction with their mixers for users to buy. I don’t mean company names as some provided but product models. Forums and their participants filled that need by trial and error, how sad, but fortunate for the users.
I have repeatedly suggested that they substitute a more current and just possibly less expensive (due to higher volume production) 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet units into their mixers instead of the 10/100 Mbps units they currently have. This was 5 years ago when these designs were started. This now limits the speed of recent external WiFi routers with a max of over 1000 Mbps with these mixers by a factor of 10. Even wired units are now limited by this. The price you pay for backward compatibility with older, slower equipment running at 10 Mbps. This is why WiFi speed tests come up with significantly lower AVERAGE thru put. Beacon Frames are sent at 1Mbps and use a significant portion of the available bandwidth as are other packets to comply with backward compatibility.
For those of you still determined to deal with the 2.4 Ghz band here are a few tips.
There are only three channels in the US without interference, 1,6,11. These should be used and often mistakenly other channels are used with the misconception that no-one is using them, surprise. There are 1,11 that have guard bands on either side (no one should be transmitting here) . Six unfortunately has no protection from either side. Old auto sensing units will pick these channels (2-5 and 7-10) and shoot themselves in the foot. I ran a scan on channel 2 only to find channel 1 frames showing up. Channel 3 showed none. So what you are now faced with is adjacent channels messages for which you have no ability to sync with disrupting the channel. A serious overlap. Not good and it goes both ways! If your traffic is on the same channel there is a mechanism to share bandwidth. That is not the case between 1 & 2 or any other adjacent channels. I choose 1 or 11 if possible. Hiding the SSID is also a fruitless exercise.
A tool for dealing with WiFi issues that I would recommend is
http://nutsaboutnets.com/wifimetrix-product-info/I am always eager to learn new concepts and factual experiences so please post but don’t give me the “I never had this problem” or “mine doesn’t do that” scenario it’s getting old.
Cheers
