At the beginning of the Pandemic, the FCC announced the opening of the 6Ghz Band for Wifi. As David Coleman from Extreme Networks says, this is the biggest thing to hit Wifi in 15+ years.
I’m on a committee for planning a Tech Retreat for education technologist in the State. In preparing for our conference in January 2022, I had the idea that very few in the state would know that this new technology was coming. I had researched some of the nuances compared to Wifi in 2.4 and 5Ghz so I decided it would be beneficial to share some of my research.
The recording of my presentation can also be found here:
My presentation slides about some of the things I learned can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RalC_TH4e8I88e7gfzmrRuEyuLC3AjsIWieWBEO9814/edit?usp=sharing
How do you show off the technology that is invisible to the human eye? You need tools and clients. I knew I needed something to show during my presentation. We attempted to get an enterprise grade AP but nothing was available yet. So, I purchased a cheap consumer grade Linksys 6Ghz Wifi AP. I purchased a Google Pixel 6 and using Analiti Android App it game me some insights.
I needed something even cooler to show off for my presentation. Luckily, the Wifi industry was on top of things and had started to adapt tools for 6Ghz. Adrian Granados had integrated 6Ghz into his Wifi Explorer Pro 3 and Airtool 2 tools for Mac as seen in the screenshot below. The issue is that it required a separate Linux computer with a specific M.2 wireless network card, the Intel AX210.
I started my research and found little tidbits of information about how to build the device. Being bleeding edge technology, it turned into a lot of discovery. I spent 2 months building my Raspberry Pi CM4 to be the remote sensor for Wifi Explorer and learned so much from the experience. Drivers were definitely the hardest part. I originally built my tool off my own version of Raspberry Pi OS instead of using the WLAN Pi OS. I presented at this conference a month before the WLAN Pi team release the WLAN Pi Pro at WLPC. I took my tool a step further and added a 5G Modem for capturing LTE Packets and Christened it the CBRS Pi. In my next post, I will share the process it took for me to build my CBRS Pi.
