As you can imagine, my home has a lot of electronics. I haven’t discussed my wireless networks in a while, but here’s what we have. A D-Link DIR-655 802.11N Router for N devices only and a Buffalo Airstation 802.11G for all the riff-raff. Our two primary laptops are the only ones in use on the D-Link, and everything else is on the Airstation, which includes non 802.11N laptops, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, two Tivos and most likely any guest laptops that come to visit. The reason for this setup, is so my N only laptops can run approximately 4x faster which matters when you have very large images and videos on the network. Remember, there is still no such thing as true mixed mode. Your high speed N network drops to G speeds as soon as one G device joins the party. These two networks have been serving our needs just fine for almost a year… until now.
You see, we have been using a wireless video camera in one of the kids rooms. Not a fancy wifi camera, but a cheap, analog based wireless camera. It works fine and sends a decent picture to our nearby bedroom TV. You have to tune in a dial to view the picture, but once you get it just right, you can leave it alone. Now that we have 2 rugrats, I needed to come up with a better solution (read: spend more money). How about this, a 4-camera, 1 receiver digital version of the same thing? PERFECT! I quickly run around the house setting up my new surveillance system. The receiver works great, comes with a remote for flipping the signals and the picture, while occasionally flickery is clear enough for checking on the kids.
Later that night, we noticed something strange. All of my 802.11x networks were broken. I mean like dead broken. The Dlink router is nowhere to be seen and the Airstation can barely maintain a signal. Can this be because of my new cameras? What do you think? The first pic is the frequency of the cameras and the second pic is my D-Link router setup utility.
Bastards! Not only are they using the same 2.4 spectrum, two of the channels overlap exactly! My first move was to disconnect the cameras and ensure that all returns to normal. It does. Now what? Return these cameras and go for something like this? Certainly a premium for a 1 camera setup. Maybe I should get a spectrum analyzer and see how I can cut down on interference… I dont know. Some people suggest just choosing the frequencies that are unused by the cameras, but is that good enough? You know how I’d hate to venture too far from the “auto” setting. But what is “auto channel” really doing? Upon further investigation, I found that both the DLink and the Airstation both auto-selected channel 10. How could that be efficient?
At this point, shipping these back to geeks.com seems unlikely, since they will hit me with a 15% restocking fee. I’ll have to continue to tweak the wireless settings of both routers until all my devices can live happily together.
Point of this post? 2.4Ghz Wireless Cameras eat 802.11x networks. Be warned!