lately I've been Mr unpopular around my house and I'm sure a lot of you can
relate whether it's buffering on the Mrs Netflix or a lag Spike on Junior's game
or an oh so important video call that I can't miss when there are problems with
the Wi-Fi the first thing that happens is
and the issue that's plagued me for the last few months turned out to be a doozy
see I've got these speakers in my family room that use a standard called wireless
audio specification 4.0 which isn't
Wi-Fi but it uses the same Spectrum as
Wi-Fi meaning that it is susceptible to the same kind of interference and
because it streams high bitrate audio with very low latency any small amount
of interference can sound a little something like this
okay
whole family movie night ruined
thankfully we got to the bottom of it you guys are never gonna believe what
was spewing RF interference out into my house and as you come along with me on
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
to Wi-Fi hero all we need is a little
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
if anyone else was experiencing the same issue and we came across an owner's
thread over on AVS Forum with over 400
Pages which is either a really good sign or a really bad one and as it turns out
it is chock full of users complaining about exactly the same audio cutouts and
stuttering that I'm experiencing here at home the good news is that thread was
full of useful information that ultimately set us down the right path
Sony's hta9s like any other wireless
device are not truly Wireless I mean they've got a wires coming out of them
right here so that they can be powered by the wall but they receive their audio
stream wirelessly rather than through a traditional speaker wire they use the
same five gigahertz Spectrum as the Wi-Fi devices in your home which can be
both a good thing and a bad thing on the
one hand five gigahertz Wi-Fi is great for high bandwidth communication so the
audio quality from these things it's actually great the problem is that while
five gigahertz was really clear back when it came out it was the perfect way
to get away from all the interference in the 2.4 gigahertz bands these days
almost everything that's using Wi-Fi in your house is going to be on five
gigahertz which means well you see a lot
of the same problems of course we don't know yet that that's the problem so one
of our first troubleshooting steps is to find out what the Wi-Fi environment
around us looks like and you can do that with one of those Wi-Fi analyzer phone
apps that are often available for free these will show you visually what ssids
or wireless networks are around you what channels they're occupying and their
relative strength as measured by your phone's antenna they are super handy and
what we're looking for is an unnamed SSID that could be being transmitted by
our Sony transmission box here and I think we've got it there's some weaker
signals from my outdoor access point but there's this really strong one I'm right
here next to it that pops up once in a while and then goes away called hidden
SSID could it be as simple as just taking the rest of my Wi-Fi network and
moving everything off of those channels here in my wireless dashboard you can
see a lot of the diagnosis for this happened on a completely different day when that hidden network was occupying
different channels that I was trying to clear out so we're still going to go
through the process for you guys let's go ahead and just wipe out everything in
that range and okay theoretically you clear out the channels
should be crystal clear right yes but only temporarily within a couple of
days the issue was back why because that hidden SSID had jumped to a completely
different Channel but believe it or not that's not a bug that's a feature
because most people are going to have all of their wireless devices configured
to automatically select the best Channel well they actually all end up hopping
around depending on what else is going on in the environment around you so Sony
in their wisdom has the ability to say hey that's not quite working for me I'ma
sit here and standby and passively scan which channel is most free and I'm gonna
jump on to that so the next time you power me up I'm gonna be good to go and
unfortunately while you can disable that channel hopping if you want to manually
manage all of your channels there's no way to tell it which channel you want it
to stay on Sony let me pick it and then I could have
solved this problem because as it turns out even if you disable it if for
whatever reason the unit loses power it could automatically select a different
one and then you gotta go back on the dashboard again
and the sides as it turned out even with
this set manually to a separate channel for my Wi-Fi the problem wasn't solved
anyway it's time to bring out the big guns or about small but effective guns
which is totally a thing this is the Y spy and long time viewers will have seen
something like it before it's a spectrum analyzer which combined with meta Geeks
software allows us to see in real time any legitimate traffic or unwanted
interference across both the 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz spectrums I
went with this because I'm familiar with the software already but you don't have
to for as little as 20 bucks you can get yourself set up with an SDR or
software-defined radio that with awesome free software can be used to do anything
from Wi-Fi analysis like we're doing today to amateur radio to building your
own gsm network and so on and so forth they're super cool and we're going to
put some learning resources in the video description down below for now though
let's compare what we see in metageek software analyzer and what we see in our
free cell phone app our ssids have very
similar relative strengths and positioning in the different five
gigahertz channels but what we can't see
in here is all the traffic and
there it is our unknown SSID with a
whole bunch of traffic this is color coded according to the intensity so blue
would be the lightest red would be the most intense and this is all yellow with
a spot of orange here's the thing about Wi-Fi it can transmit over top of this
kind of background noise but it's slow and it's unreliable so what Wi-Fi
devices are designed to do is weight their turn nicely in order to optimize
their use of the available Spectrum that's one of the reasons that you
always want to make sure that you Center your 2.4 gigahertz networks over 1 6 and
12 rather than using the in-betweens which will just cause unnecessary
interference making them not play with each other nicely but because this is
wireless audio there's no such thing as waiting to send a packet you don't have
a ton of time to buffer data because otherwise the user is going to notice
the audio and the video being out of sync so we pretty much can't use any
channel funnels that the hta9 is occupying and yet it went and it picked
channels that have ssids on them or so I
thought I've never been so disappointed to have something working perfectly because
here's the thing even though those ssids
are broadcasting on the same channel as the Sony audio system well you're not
actually transmitting any data unless you're doing giant file copies so it
turns out that wasn't even the problem thankfully when you step up your game to
one of these antennas you can identify interference from all kinds of different
non-Wi-Fi devices meta geek actually provides this really helpful little
graphic to show you what signatures of
different interfering devices might look like they don't include a microwave but
that's okay I can show you that we're on 2.4 gigahertz ever had your Bluetooth
headphones cut out when you're trying to microwave something in the kitchen well
I'm gonna show you guys why see this waterfall over time it goes from traffic
on the established 2.4 gigahertz channels to
this is a good opportunity to show you guys why that's not a problem for five
gigahertz though look at that nothing
well we know there's something we just gotta find it this is the point in the
video where things start to look a little more like a ghost hunting reality
show than Tech tips but I swear to you what I'm doing is legit we found the
best results are from wrapping the entire y-spy box
and then making ourselves kind of a cone
around the antenna in this way we can turn our
omnidirectional antenna into a directional antenna which is going to
make it a lot easier for us to Zone in on smaller sources of interference
now I already alluded to there being some movie Magic in this video
we absolutely nailed it yesterday we found it we screen capped it it was a
fluke I don't think we're gonna get it again but we're going to give it a shot
and failing that we'll show you guys the recorded footage
let's go for the doubters that I'm sure are out there yes our directional
antenna does work you can tell because when I point it at our source of
interference rather than away from it boom look at it light up
then watch I'm going to turn it around
and that red zone is going to go away
of course this is not a very granular tool in its current form but we can fix
that because we're specifically looking for devices that are interfering with
our wireless audio setup we only care about this narrow Little slice of
spectrum right here we're going to use a feature in this software called device
finder so we're focused in on this and basically we're gonna go around and look
for problematic spikes that's not the cat oh oh we did actually
get a little Spike there hello
hey Christmas
interferes
oh uh guys can you it wasn't Christmas
the kids turned the TV back on and the TV's over there
the Christmas tree is clean
oh interesting this is sending out pulses
printers
oh we have some Z-Wave lights
I got a little blip really anything that
plugs in is a possibility smart thermostats
smart lights I know I told these to use the 2.4
gigahertz Network oh oh there's
something going on here this is so far away from the family room though see the
thing about five gigahertz is that it's limited transmission range can actually
again be a feature rather than a bug because it's much less likely to
interfere with another device that's far away even if your Wi-Fi reception might
not be as good as it was on 2.4 this is quite substantial though wait even after
I walked away I was getting these spikes yeah these Govi smart lights are
definitely kicking off five gigahertz
oh we are getting all kinds of interference in the mechanical room
I don't know that it's from these guys specifically because what's interesting
is when I move back a little bit all of
a sudden it's all over the oh no it's really
because calm down a little bit Whaler
Bueller you know what it is I know why
there's so much in here come on over here Brandon
yeah oh that's spicy
I know why there's so much in here it is what you found yesterday it looks like
the issue is my Z-Wave Network as I walk into the room and Trigger
motion from my Z-Wave switches yep there
we go look at them go
oh man that's why it's so hard to nail
down where the interference is coming from because I've got a hundred of these
bloody things all over my house to be
clear it may not actually be jasco's
fault specifically I had some really weird Z-Wave issues recently that I was
diagnosing with one of the developers of z-wave.js for home assistant where he
said and this is a direct quote
I haven't seen some of these log messages before and I've seen a lot of
logs so it could be these devices but it
could also be some of the other Z-Wave devices on my network that are causing
in particular some really sticky
non-optimal routing that means there's a lot of hops going around anytime
anything's happening on the network we managed to resolve it enough
temporarily that I'm able to actually you know configure devices but it's
clear that it's an ongoing issue that I need to resolve with my Z-Wave devices
so the good news is that I know what the problem is but the bad news is that the
long-term solution is probably an upcoming switch from in a value that
doesn't even exist yet or maybe even going all the way back to dumb switches
for now kids I think you're stuck with bad audio sometimes up here can you
maybe use the theater instead yeah
yeah you don't want to teachers but you don't like the theater
you didn't finish your snack today you got to finish your snack and you gotta
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care of business it's possible that six gigahertz Wi-Fi is going to alleviate
some of these issues for those of you who don't know six gigahertz Wi-Fi is
opening up more Spectrum to Wi-Fi so that there's going to be less congestion
but flip side is that as soon as you open up
that spectrum and everybody like piles into it you're bound to run into these
sort of problems yet uh again if you
guys enjoyed this video who knows maybe you'd enjoy the original video I did
taking a much more in-depth look at the Y spy and channelizer software it's from
like seven years ago or something