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lately I've been Mr unpopular around my house and I'm sure a lot of you can

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relate whether it's buffering on the Mrs Netflix or a lag Spike on Junior's game

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or an oh so important video call that I can't miss when there are problems with

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the Wi-Fi the first thing that happens is

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and the issue that's plagued me for the last few months turned out to be a doozy

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see I've got these speakers in my family room that use a standard called wireless

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audio specification 4.0 which isn't

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Wi-Fi but it uses the same Spectrum as

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Wi-Fi meaning that it is susceptible to the same kind of interference and

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because it streams high bitrate audio with very low latency any small amount

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of interference can sound a little something like this

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okay

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whole family movie night ruined

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thankfully we got to the bottom of it you guys are never gonna believe what

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was spewing RF interference out into my house and as you come along with me on

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this journey of Discovery I am sure you're going to pick up some tips and tricks that'll take you from Wi-Fi zero

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to Wi-Fi hero all we need is a little

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bit of help from the contents of this pouch

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like any other problem these days the first thing we did was Google it to see

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if anyone else was experiencing the same issue and we came across an owner's

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thread over on AVS Forum with over 400

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Pages which is either a really good sign or a really bad one and as it turns out

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it is chock full of users complaining about exactly the same audio cutouts and

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stuttering that I'm experiencing here at home the good news is that thread was

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full of useful information that ultimately set us down the right path

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Sony's hta9s like any other wireless

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device are not truly Wireless I mean they've got a wires coming out of them

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right here so that they can be powered by the wall but they receive their audio

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stream wirelessly rather than through a traditional speaker wire they use the

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same five gigahertz Spectrum as the Wi-Fi devices in your home which can be

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both a good thing and a bad thing on the

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one hand five gigahertz Wi-Fi is great for high bandwidth communication so the

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audio quality from these things it's actually great the problem is that while

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five gigahertz was really clear back when it came out it was the perfect way

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to get away from all the interference in the 2.4 gigahertz bands these days

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almost everything that's using Wi-Fi in your house is going to be on five

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gigahertz which means well you see a lot

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of the same problems of course we don't know yet that that's the problem so one

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of our first troubleshooting steps is to find out what the Wi-Fi environment

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around us looks like and you can do that with one of those Wi-Fi analyzer phone

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apps that are often available for free these will show you visually what ssids

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or wireless networks are around you what channels they're occupying and their

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relative strength as measured by your phone's antenna they are super handy and

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what we're looking for is an unnamed SSID that could be being transmitted by

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our Sony transmission box here and I think we've got it there's some weaker

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signals from my outdoor access point but there's this really strong one I'm right

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here next to it that pops up once in a while and then goes away called hidden

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SSID could it be as simple as just taking the rest of my Wi-Fi network and

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moving everything off of those channels here in my wireless dashboard you can

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see a lot of the diagnosis for this happened on a completely different day when that hidden network was occupying

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different channels that I was trying to clear out so we're still going to go

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through the process for you guys let's go ahead and just wipe out everything in

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that range and okay theoretically you clear out the channels

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should be crystal clear right yes but only temporarily within a couple of

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days the issue was back why because that hidden SSID had jumped to a completely

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different Channel but believe it or not that's not a bug that's a feature

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because most people are going to have all of their wireless devices configured

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to automatically select the best Channel well they actually all end up hopping

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around depending on what else is going on in the environment around you so Sony

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in their wisdom has the ability to say hey that's not quite working for me I'ma

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sit here and standby and passively scan which channel is most free and I'm gonna

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jump on to that so the next time you power me up I'm gonna be good to go and

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unfortunately while you can disable that channel hopping if you want to manually

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manage all of your channels there's no way to tell it which channel you want it

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to stay on Sony let me pick it and then I could have

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solved this problem because as it turns out even if you disable it if for

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whatever reason the unit loses power it could automatically select a different

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one and then you gotta go back on the dashboard again

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and the sides as it turned out even with

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this set manually to a separate channel for my Wi-Fi the problem wasn't solved

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anyway it's time to bring out the big guns or about small but effective guns

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which is totally a thing this is the Y spy and long time viewers will have seen

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something like it before it's a spectrum analyzer which combined with meta Geeks

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software allows us to see in real time any legitimate traffic or unwanted

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interference across both the 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz spectrums I

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went with this because I'm familiar with the software already but you don't have

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to for as little as 20 bucks you can get yourself set up with an SDR or

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software-defined radio that with awesome free software can be used to do anything

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from Wi-Fi analysis like we're doing today to amateur radio to building your

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own gsm network and so on and so forth they're super cool and we're going to

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put some learning resources in the video description down below for now though

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let's compare what we see in metageek software analyzer and what we see in our

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free cell phone app our ssids have very

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similar relative strengths and positioning in the different five

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gigahertz channels but what we can't see

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in here is all the traffic and

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there it is our unknown SSID with a

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whole bunch of traffic this is color coded according to the intensity so blue

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would be the lightest red would be the most intense and this is all yellow with

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a spot of orange here's the thing about Wi-Fi it can transmit over top of this

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kind of background noise but it's slow and it's unreliable so what Wi-Fi

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devices are designed to do is weight their turn nicely in order to optimize

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their use of the available Spectrum that's one of the reasons that you

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always want to make sure that you Center your 2.4 gigahertz networks over 1 6 and

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12 rather than using the in-betweens which will just cause unnecessary

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interference making them not play with each other nicely but because this is

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wireless audio there's no such thing as waiting to send a packet you don't have

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a ton of time to buffer data because otherwise the user is going to notice

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the audio and the video being out of sync so we pretty much can't use any

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channel funnels that the hta9 is occupying and yet it went and it picked

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channels that have ssids on them or so I

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thought I've never been so disappointed to have something working perfectly because

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here's the thing even though those ssids

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are broadcasting on the same channel as the Sony audio system well you're not

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actually transmitting any data unless you're doing giant file copies so it

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turns out that wasn't even the problem thankfully when you step up your game to

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one of these antennas you can identify interference from all kinds of different

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non-Wi-Fi devices meta geek actually provides this really helpful little

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graphic to show you what signatures of

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different interfering devices might look like they don't include a microwave but

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that's okay I can show you that we're on 2.4 gigahertz ever had your Bluetooth

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headphones cut out when you're trying to microwave something in the kitchen well

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I'm gonna show you guys why see this waterfall over time it goes from traffic

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on the established 2.4 gigahertz channels to

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this is a good opportunity to show you guys why that's not a problem for five

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gigahertz though look at that nothing

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well we know there's something we just gotta find it this is the point in the

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video where things start to look a little more like a ghost hunting reality

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show than Tech tips but I swear to you what I'm doing is legit we found the

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best results are from wrapping the entire y-spy box

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and then making ourselves kind of a cone

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around the antenna in this way we can turn our

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omnidirectional antenna into a directional antenna which is going to

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make it a lot easier for us to Zone in on smaller sources of interference

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now I already alluded to there being some movie Magic in this video

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we absolutely nailed it yesterday we found it we screen capped it it was a

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fluke I don't think we're gonna get it again but we're going to give it a shot

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and failing that we'll show you guys the recorded footage

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let's go for the doubters that I'm sure are out there yes our directional

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antenna does work you can tell because when I point it at our source of

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interference rather than away from it boom look at it light up

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then watch I'm going to turn it around

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and that red zone is going to go away

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of course this is not a very granular tool in its current form but we can fix

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that because we're specifically looking for devices that are interfering with

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our wireless audio setup we only care about this narrow Little slice of

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spectrum right here we're going to use a feature in this software called device

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finder so we're focused in on this and basically we're gonna go around and look

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for problematic spikes that's not the cat oh oh we did actually

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get a little Spike there hello

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hey Christmas

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interferes

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oh uh guys can you it wasn't Christmas

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the kids turned the TV back on and the TV's over there

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the Christmas tree is clean

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oh interesting this is sending out pulses

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printers

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oh we have some Z-Wave lights

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I got a little blip really anything that

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plugs in is a possibility smart thermostats

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smart lights I know I told these to use the 2.4

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gigahertz Network oh oh there's

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something going on here this is so far away from the family room though see the

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thing about five gigahertz is that it's limited transmission range can actually

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again be a feature rather than a bug because it's much less likely to

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interfere with another device that's far away even if your Wi-Fi reception might

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not be as good as it was on 2.4 this is quite substantial though wait even after

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I walked away I was getting these spikes yeah these Govi smart lights are

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definitely kicking off five gigahertz

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oh we are getting all kinds of interference in the mechanical room

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I don't know that it's from these guys specifically because what's interesting

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is when I move back a little bit all of

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a sudden it's all over the oh no it's really

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because calm down a little bit Whaler

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Bueller you know what it is I know why

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there's so much in here come on over here Brandon

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yeah oh that's spicy

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I know why there's so much in here it is what you found yesterday it looks like

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the issue is my Z-Wave Network as I walk into the room and Trigger

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motion from my Z-Wave switches yep there

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we go look at them go

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oh man that's why it's so hard to nail

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down where the interference is coming from because I've got a hundred of these

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bloody things all over my house to be

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clear it may not actually be jasco's

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fault specifically I had some really weird Z-Wave issues recently that I was

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diagnosing with one of the developers of z-wave.js for home assistant where he

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said and this is a direct quote

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I haven't seen some of these log messages before and I've seen a lot of

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logs so it could be these devices but it

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could also be some of the other Z-Wave devices on my network that are causing

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in particular some really sticky

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non-optimal routing that means there's a lot of hops going around anytime

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anything's happening on the network we managed to resolve it enough

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temporarily that I'm able to actually you know configure devices but it's

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clear that it's an ongoing issue that I need to resolve with my Z-Wave devices

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so the good news is that I know what the problem is but the bad news is that the

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long-term solution is probably an upcoming switch from in a value that

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doesn't even exist yet or maybe even going all the way back to dumb switches

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for now kids I think you're stuck with bad audio sometimes up here can you

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maybe use the theater instead yeah

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yeah you don't want to teachers but you don't like the theater

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you didn't finish your snack today you got to finish your snack and you gotta

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finish this segue to our sponsor thanks to freshbooks for sponsoring today's

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freshbooks.com Linus step away from the number crunching and get back to taking

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care of business it's possible that six gigahertz Wi-Fi is going to alleviate

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some of these issues for those of you who don't know six gigahertz Wi-Fi is

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opening up more Spectrum to Wi-Fi so that there's going to be less congestion

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but flip side is that as soon as you open up

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that spectrum and everybody like piles into it you're bound to run into these

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sort of problems yet uh again if you

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guys enjoyed this video who knows maybe you'd enjoy the original video I did

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taking a much more in-depth look at the Y spy and channelizer software it's from

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like seven years ago or something