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Q. Why is TamoGraph much more affordable than the competing site
survey products?
A. Surprisingly, this non-technical question is probably the most
frequently asked one. TamoGraph is more affordable for a number of
reasons. We don't spend money on an impressive office in Silicon
Valley. We don't fly first class looking for more venture capital.
We've been in the software business for 15 years and we know how to
work efficiently, to maintain a high brain-to-fat ratio. We also
believe that all WLAN professionals should be able to afford a
professional tool to do their job.
Q. Do I need a compatible Wi-Fi card to perform active
surveys?
A. No, you can use pretty much any modern Wi-Fi adapter. However,
active surveys give you only a small part of the WLAN picture. To
get comprehensive information, passive surveys are mandatory. A
compatible adapter is required for passive surveys.
Q. My card is not on your list of supported hardware. What are my
options?
A. On Windows: Our hardware compatibility list includes only those
cards that we've tested ourselves in our test lab. There are other
cards that may be compatible with TamoGraph. The best way to find
out if your card is compatible is downloading our
Adapter Test Utility
and running it on your computer. If a compatible adapter is
installed, the utility will display its name. Before running our
test utility, make sure that you use the latest driver supplied by
your computer or adapter vendor. Visit their Web site to download
and install the latest driver version. This is important, because
the results of the test depend on the driver that is used. The
newer the driver, the better the chances that it will work with
TamoGraph. Finally, you may want to buy a compatible card, as they
are not terribly expensive these days. Or simply order a boxed
version from us; it comes with a compatible USB adapter. On macOS:
TamoGraph works with the integrated Wi-Fi adapter built into your
MacBook. It neither requires nor supports external USB
adapters.
Q. Why is the left panel that is supposed to display the list of
access points empty?
A. This might be the case for a number of reasons:
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You do not have a compatible adapter for passive surveys. The
access point list is populated only if you have a compatible
adapter or if you opened a project that already contains previously
collected survey data.
-
You did not install the driver for your compatible adapter. Please
refer to the Driver Installation chapter for instructions. To
verify that your compatible adapter is present and functioning
correctly, look at the lower left corner of the application window.
Your compatible adapter name should be displayed there. If the
adapter name is displayed, but the list is still empty, contact our
technical support.
Q. Does TamoGraph support 802.11ac WLANs?
A. Yes, it does.
Q. Do I need an 802.11ac adapter to survey 802.11ac WLANs?
A. This depends on the type of survey. For passive surveys, a
supported 802.11n adapter is sufficient, as long as it is a
dual-band adapter, i.e., if it can work in the 5 GHz band. Such
adapters can capture 802.11ac management frames, which is needed
for passive surveys. For active surveys, when your adapter is
associated to the WLAN to measure throughput and actual PHY rate,
you may want to use an 802.11ac adapter if you need to know the
WLAN metrics for 802.11ac clients. However, this is not mandatory,
because you may want to estimate throughput for 802.11n clients,
which are far more widely used than 802.11ac clients are at the
time of this writing. In this case, an 802.11n adapter for active
surveys will suffice.
Q. I have a Wi-Spy USB spectrum analyzer. Do I still need a
separate Wi-Fi adapter for passive or active surveys?
A. Yes, you do. Wi-Spy can be used for spectrum analysis only. It
cannot replace a Wi-Fi adapter because it cannot capture packets or
connect to networks.
Q. If I select a small Guess Range, then the predicted coverage at
the end of the survey does not cover the whole office area that I
am testing. Yet, if I increase the Guess Range, the coverage
shadows seem to be bigger and cover the whole office. So I am
confused how the results can have any accuracy when the Guess range
can easily be manipulated to change the outcome of the coverage
visualization.
A. Survey results may have an accuracy close to 100% only if you
survey every square centimeter of the floor plan. Of course, this
is impossible in practice (and not necessary), so the application
has to do some extrapolation work to calculate the results for
areas that have not been surveyed but that are near the walkabout
path. There is a dependency between the guess range and the
environment. If you are in the middle of a stadium field with no
obstacles, Wi-Fi signal propagates freely and can be easily
predicted dozens of meters around; therefore, you can use a greater
guess range. If you are in a crowded office, signal propagation is
very complex, so using the guess range that you used on the stadium
field would be wrong. TamoGraph recommends a guess range for each
environment type; this recommended value should be taken into
account when you plan your walkabout paths. For example, if the
recommended guess range is 5 meters and you survey the area by
walking parallel paths, the distance between the parallel lines
should not exceed 5 meters. To sum this up, if you conduct a
quality survey by walking the entire area and leaving no “blank
spots,” and if your walkabout paths are not far apart, then
increasing the guess range would have almost no negative effect.
That’s because, in such a scenario, you leave no room for the
guesswork.
Q. I noticed that the AP icon location affects the visualizations.
When I move the icon, the visualizations change. How can I avoid
that?
A. Moving the AP icon may or may not affect visualizations; this
depends on the TamoGraph settings. A very detailed explanation of
this functionality can be found in the
Visualization Settings
chapter of this help file; see the
How AP icon locations affect signal
option description.
Q. Do I need to link the Multi-SSID APs manually to get valid
results in the SIR visualization?
A. Usually, TamoGraph tries to group multiple SSIDs together
automatically during the survey. However, depending on specific
WLAN implementations, it might not be an error-free process. If you
noticed that TamoGraph had not detected some SSID groups correctly,
it is recommended that you link the SSIDs belonging to the same
physical AP manually to get proper SIR results. It is preferable to
do manual SSID linking after the entire passive survey is
completed.
Q. Does TamoGraph support multi-floor projects?
A. Yes, you can create projects with multiple floors in TamoGraph.
If you perform predictive modeling, simply add new floors in Floor
Manager, add floor plans for each floor, define floor height and
material, and then align the floors.
Q. Do I need to use the Floor Manager and floor alignment in
passive surveys?
Does the program take into account the floor materials and floor
order in passive surveys?
A.
No. The "Floor Manager" and "Align Floors" tools should be used for
RF predictive models only. In passive surveys, the application
collects actual signal data regardless of the floors and AP
locations; in other words, it doesn’t “care” about floors, their
order or materials.
Q. I conducted a passive survey in a multi-floor building, and some
of the APs were auto-placed on adjacent floors rather than on the
floor where they are actually located. How do I correct
that?
A. If you know the actual locations of the APs on the their
respective floors, then for each floor: (a) manually correct the
locations of the APs that are physically located on that floor and
(b) drag the icons of all APs that belong to other floors off the
floor plan. If you don’t know the actual locations of any APs and
wish to view the signal coverage map only, then clear all AP
locations; this will make the application use only the actual data,
without any extrapolations.
Q. I have one physical AP that I want to move around to simulate
multiple APs before deploying my WLAN. Can TamoGraph treat this
single AP as multiple APs so that I can estimate the
characteristics of the future WLAN?
A. Yes, this widely used method is called “AP-on-a-stick”.
TamoGraph provides the functionality necessary to handle such
scenarios. Please see
Splitting an AP into Multiple Unique APs
for detailed instructions.
Q. It appears that there are very few virtual AP templates and all
of them are for generic APs. How do I create a virtual AP that
simulates a specific model by a major Wi-Fi equipment
vendor?
A. Virtual APs can be constructed like Legos. For example, if you
want to simulate a
Cisco Aironet 2700 series
AP, you should begin with the
Generic dual 802.11ac
template. Place the AP on the floor map, double-click on it,
configure its properties to match the properties of the physical AP
you plan to deploy (e.g., channel width or output power), and then
select the antenna type, which in your case should be
Cisco Aironet 2700 series 4 dBi.
Be sure to do this for both radios of this dual-band AP. In other
words, you use Lego bricks to build a model that matches the actual
AP. You can then save this configuration as a new template and use
it in your projects. Why don’t we provide you with a ready-to-use
model? Because we cannot know how you plan to configure your
physical
Cisco Aironet 2700 series
APs. For example, we cannot know whether you plan to use 20 or 40
MHz channels in your APs. This is why you have the utmost
flexibility in creating your own template.
Q. Is there a way to tell the software to ignore all APs except the
one with which I am are surveying? I want to collect data for
our survey AP only and generate a report for this AP only.
A. You can have visualizations for any set of AP, even a single AP.
There are two buttons on the toolbar that switch between the “All
APs” and “Selected APs” modes, so you can press the latter and
select only one AP on the left pane. Please note that in case of
the Signal-to-Interference Ratio visualization, the signal of the
selected AP is analyzed against all APs in the projects.
Q. Can I use multiple adapters with TamoGraph to make the scanning
process faster?
A. On macOS - no. On Windows - yes, TamoGraph can capture data from
multiple channels simultaneously if you use multiple compatible USB
adapters. This shortens the time needed to collect data from the
channels being scanned as you move along the survey path, and,
therefore, improves the data quality. For example, with the default
250 ms per channel interval, it takes five seconds to sweep through
20 channels if you use only one adapter. If you use three adapters,
the same amount of data will be collected in less than two seconds.
The following 802.11n USB adapters can be used for multi-channel
capturing: D-Link DWA-160 v.A1, v.A2, v.B2, and v.C1, Edimax
EW-7733UnD, Linksys AE3000, NETGEAR WN111 v2, NETGEAR WNDA3100 v1,
Proxim ORiNOCO 8494, SMC Networks SMCWUSB-N2, Sony UWA-BR100,
TP-Link TL-WDN3200, TP-Link TL-WN721N, TP-Link TL- WN722N, TP-Link
TL-WN821N v1, v2, and v3, TP-Link TL-WN822N v1 and v2, Ubiquiti
SR71-USB, and CACE Technologies AirPcap Ex or NX. The following
802.11ac USB adapters can be used for multi-channel capturing:
Belkin F9L1109 v1, D-Link DWA-180 rev A1, D-Link DWA-182 rev C1,
Edimax EW-7822UAC, EnGenius EUB1200AC, Linksys WUSB6300, NETGEAR
A6210, Proxim ORiNOCO 9100, TP-LINK Archer T4U, TRENDnet TEW-805UB,
and ZyXEL AC240. Note that different types of adapters cannot be
mixed; all of the adapters should be of the same model. You should
also install the same driver for all of the adapters.
Q. Some of the channels in the scanner options window are not
listed. Is this normal? What if I want to monitor these channels?
Is this normal? What if I want to monitor these channels?
A. The answer depends on the adapter type and operating system. For
Windows:
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Atheros-based miniPCI and miniPCIe adapters: Depending on your
country, your wireless adapter may not support all the channels
shown in that window. The channels that are available for use in a
particular country differ according to the regulations of that
country. In the United States, for example, FCC regulations only
allow channels 1 to 11 to be used in the 802.11b/g/n band. The
firmware of the wireless adapters being sold in the US is typically
configured to disallow channels 12 and 13.
-
Atheros-based USB adapters, Intel 7xxx and 8xxx miniPCIe adapters,
and recommended Ralink-, MediaTek-, and Realtek-based USB adapters:
All channels are always available when using them in
TamoGraph.
-
Other adapters (e.g. Intel 6xxx, Dell, or Broadcom): enabling
channels 12 and 13 may be possible. Open the TamoGraph application
folder (usually C:\Program Files\TamoGraph or C:\Program Files
(x86)\TamoGraph). You will see the file named ch1213.exe there.
Double-click on that file to execute it. Restart TamoGraph and
enable channel 12 and 13 in the scanner options; these channels
will become available for selection. Note that the adapter's
ability to capture packets on channels 12 and 13 depends on the
regulatory domain set by the laptop vendor. If the vendor enabled
them in your case, there won't be a problem. However, we've heard
of many examples when laptop vendors did not enable channels 12 and
13 even in the laptops that were sold in a country where these
channels were legal.
For macOS, depending on the region where it was sold, your
MacBook’s Wi-Fi adapter comes with a preset country code, e.g. “US”
(for USA), “AU” (for Australia), or “X2” for Europe. This normally
defines the set of available channels. However, the set of
available channels might change dynamically. On macOS versions
prior to Sierra, the Wi-Fi adapter “listens” to the country codes
that some routers broadcasted using the 802.11d standard. Once the
adapter “decided” that it had been relocated to a new regulatory
domain, it changed its country code, effectively changing the list
of available channels and a few other parameters, such as maximum
output power. On macOS Sierra and newer, the system uses Location
Services to figure out where your MacBook is located. If, for
whatever reason, you want to prevent macOS from switching to a new
country code, go to
System Preferences => Security and Privacy => Privacy =>
Location Services => System Services => Details
and uncheck the “Wi-Fi Networking” box.
Q. Why is the UDP downstream throughput value always zero?
A. This is a firewall issue. This means that the UDP data being
sent from the server cannot reach the client. When performing UDP
testing, the client sends upstream UDP traffic to the server from a
random UDP port to the server port (27100 by default.) The return
downstream traffic goes from port 27101 to the client source port.
Use this information to configure your firewall.
Q. Why do I see very high (over 50%) UDP downstream loss?
A. This question is answered in the
UDP
Upstream and Downstream Loss
chapter.
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