802.11ac RF Hands-On with Buffalo AirStation WZR-1750H

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We just stopped by Buffalo's booth at CES 2012, who were kind enough to let us use a WiSpy DBx from Metageek we're working on reviewing to look at an 802.11ac signal. The WiSpy DBx is an inexpensive (for spectrum analyzers) spectral analysis tool, and with 802.11ac specifically the interesting thing to look at is what 80 MHz OFDM window. This is as opposed to the 20 or 40 MHz channels that are a part of 802.11n.

With the markers shown, clearly 80 MHz OFDM

Buffalo was running a 3x3:3 80 MHz 802.11ac demo at their booth, with two AirStation WZR-1750H APs and their visible Broadcom miniPCIe 802.11ac solution visible. The two cards were just wired together (even though 802.11ac works on 5 GHz) just to ensure no spectrum crowding issues affected the demo. However, Buffalo let us get nice and close to the pigtails, close enough to catch some of the 5 GHz RF leaking out. Wired together the simple network with two APs talking to each other was doing just over 800 Mbps of traffic.

Gallery: Buffalo AirStation WZR-1750H 802.11ac 80 MHz in Chanalyzer







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