For a training that is all about wireless, it was very interesting to see how many wired cables there were. I found myself wondering how many people there are who think that wireless is only wireless (and I won’t be surprised if that also includes some IT people).
I was glad that I was allowed to attend this training from Globeron. I thought that I knew the basics of Wi-Fi, since I have my CCNA Wireless certificate, but I learned that was not quite true. Okay, maybe that’s not totally true, but I did learn a lot that week. For example, I learned where CCNA wireless starts with the theory and later configuring from Cisco AP’s, and I learned that CWNA is all about in-depth theory.
The trainer said that the first day was the heaviest, with a lot of theory. The funny part was at the beginning of two other days he said, “Today it will be a red bull chapter.” I didn’t mind, but that was 3 heavy days! The first day was in-depth Radio Frequencies fundamentals and math. I had the feeling that I was back in college. One of my courses, during my bachelor studies, was Digital Audio Processing: Amplitudes, frequencies, wavelengths, Lambda, Watt and Decibel. Thankfully, we didn’t need to calculate all that in training, only Watt to Decibel. What was an eye-opener, and what you see going wrong in a lot of SOHO environments, was antenna polarization. With an omni directional antenna, the waves are like a donut around the antenna, so it covers already all the horizontal directions (and a bit in the vertical direction). So if you have two transmitter antennas and you beam them both in a different direction, the waves will be out of phase and this will affect your signal strength. I’m pretty sure there are a tons of SOHO networks (more home related networks) that mess up the signal strength by playing with the antennas.
We also studied a chapter about site surveys. Sadly I can’t quite remember a tweet that I saw, but it was something about the percentage of walking done during a survey. You will make your daily amount of steps for that day {since that’s a popular feature on your smartphone nowadays. Everybody is all about health and how many steps they made that day!} Before starting a survey there are so many things that you need to take into account. Not really talking about the requirements, but are you allowed to get in every room, how safe is it in the building, etc. Think about radiation in hospitals or other companies that are not safe for your own body and where you need special clothing. Those questions are mostly forgotten since engineers think mostly about technical stuff.
