Wireless Service Providers → Re: Noisy UBNT gear appearing in our area

LOL indeed.

I don't suspect this is the Ubnt AirMax (Their TDMA stuff) as they do NOT appear in any 802.11 scans (At least as far as I've seen when running in AirMax mode). So if you see their SSID, it means you're also running AirMax and are thus pissing on your own self just as much as you claim they are.

This COULD be the AirMax stuff running in 802.11 mode, but then it would make no sense what you're claiming about them not obeying "Etiquette" (Which doesn't exist in any form... Hello CANOPY!!)

So something doesn't make sense in what you're saying. That or there is some serious buggy stuff going on at Ubnt.

Either way, yes, when run in AirMax these things are like chainsaws. They will chop up everything in the band, and don't seem to be that affected by others (Much) because of some things done in the AirMax protocol that makes it a tad different (Last my understanding of it was that it was a psudo TDMA in the fact that it behaved like TDMA with other adjustments to avoid needing GPS timing etc... Which I don't understand how is possible, but anyway that's another topic)

I don't know what you're whining about though as these things are pretty much (Dare I say it and be flamed) like Canopy. They lack some of the nice Canopy things like GPS, but they certainly can kick the shit out of some nearby stuff.

Another thing to keep in mind is most of these things are native MIMO with both V and H polarity. So you're gonna see them from both polarities.

How are measuring/judging that they are radiating at high power levels? Just because you see them everywhere isn't exactly a decent way to measure it. I know many people who set these up with no regards to the power settings, but I also know many people who cry wolf when they see them and scream they are running illegally when they're not.

That's like comparing General Sherman's march into Atlanta to a Sunday afternoon family BBQ.

If "AirMax" is based on the FreeBSD TDMA code (which I am told it is), the packets will still be sniffable as 802.11 packets.

Beacon frames with SSID are transmitted by all Atheros TDMA protocols and the Intel/FreeBSD RCP protocol (which we assume Ubiquiti is using) makes even slave radios transmit beacons to capture free slots advertised in master radio's beacon. But since the beacons are not complete, some 802.11 firmware will ignore them during scan.

If you (or anyone else) have multiple Airmax radios available, could you kindly pass lots of traffic between 3 of them and scan/capture raw 802.11 frames for some time? You can find Tamos URL and instructions in my old posts - use the free evaluation.

P.S. Save the data for my curiosity.

I thought you ran Mikrotik???? Our Airmax APs show up in the 802.11 scan of our same frequency MT gear (ie XR-5 MT ap will see any 5M aps) not only that but we get the radio name and I believe even a router os version (bogus of course).