Riverman wrote: ↑Mon Mar 09, 2026 6:19 pm
the dongle is low power and will not interfere, due to it continuing to broadcast it is causing the wifi to drop continuously.
Interference isn't the only cause of problems when it comes to WiFi, there can also be problems with clients that receive very low signal strength as well.
If the data logger barely receives the signal from the AP, this will cause the AP to also slow other clients down as well due to the way WiFi solves the problem of how to fairly share air time between clients connected, especially if it's dropping in and out a bit and there is a lot of packet re-transmission due to the AP or client missing packets.
Building construction is another factor as concrete/double brick will absorb more signal than weatherboard homes, metallic frames and metallic insulation may also be problematic and single vs double or even triple pane windows.
This can be a real pain in the butt for those wanting to do monitoring away from where they have their AP, and the best solution is to run an Ethernet cable and put an AP closer to the client.
From what I've read about WiFi only range extenders is that they can make the problem worst, as the cheap and nasty one's may only have 1 radio transceiver chip, so they broadcast on the same frequencies that they use for backhaul to another AP.
In the portal if you go to devices and click on the logger, what's the signal strength seem to be?
Mine's showing 3 out of 4 bars through multiple weatherboard walls and no more than 5m from the AP, although the API returns a value of 72 which I'm not sure if it means 72% or -72dBm or what exactly.
My AP is more helpful in giving actual strengths, in this case it's reporting the signal it's receiving as -64 dBm with the noise floor at -87 dBm. The noise floor is an indication of the interference from other things and if the data logger is almost that low the above problems occur.
Where as my laptop is much closer to the AP and it's reporting -36 dBm.
It's worth noting that dBm is not a linear scale, so while -64 dBm might seem like half that of -36 dBm, it's not. -36 dBm equals 0.000251 mW and -64 dBm equals 0.000000398 mW and -87 dBm is 0.000000002 mW.
I'd be very surprised if the data logger was causing interference just because it is also in AP mode, because AP mode with no clients connected only broadcasts beacons periodically for an infinitesimally small amount of time.
If there was a client connected and that client was sending or receiving as fast as supported then that can be a source of interference.
Fox uses a chip that supports WiFi 4, 802.11n, in their data loggers but a quick search brought up posts saying it will fall back to WiFi 3, 802.11g, so that could be another problem and by putting it on a different AP would stop it from effecting other WiFi clients on the current AP.