AP 7532 increasing transmit power

[OGB-NIKO]

I would like to know the steps for increasing transmit power or signal strength on specific AP 7532s they have smart-RF enabled on them and i am running version 9.2.5 OS. We have a controller cluster with two NX5500s.

Thank you

[ckelly · Accepted solution]

Okay...that's what I suspected.
You have to understand that if the client cannot 'hear' the AP, then there's a really good chance that the AP won't be able to hear the client either.
So just because you turn the AP up to 11 doesn't mean that the AP will be able to hear the responses coming back from the client.
Ideally, you want your AP's power settings to match those of your most important, least-capable device. Otherwise, you start dealing with issues caused by asymmetric power levels.

For now though, you can try bumping up the power on the AP a little to see if it might help (it might possibly). But, in doing some, you're increasing the cell size around that AP which will then cause the other APs to shrink theirs or possibly change channels (SmartRF) which is disruptive to client associations.

Bottom line, the real solution is to place an AP closer to the dead spots.

[OGB-NIKO]

Chris

Certain areas and not all are not seeing any of the WIFI network broadcasts more less they are dead spots

[ckelly]

The immediate answer to your question (because I'm going to follow it up with a 'WHY?') is that you would need to navigate to each of the APs you want to change in the Configuration->Devices tab.
In the Interfaces for each AP, go into either Radio 1 or Radio 2 and change the "Transmit Power" setting from "Smart" to a static value. This is because using SmartRF, it uses a configured minimum and maximum power range to determine the best value.
You would need to repeat this for each AP that you want to statically assign a higher power level to.

Now....if you wanted to allow all of your APs to *potentially* be moved to a higher transmit power by SmartRF *if needed*, you would change the max power level as defined in the SmartRF policy assigned to the RFDomain that those APs are using.

So the question then is - Why do you want to do this? There are possible legitimate reasons for wanting to do this, but if doing this arbitrarily w/o understanding what the situation is, you could possibly make a bad situation worse.