Two Pins on each Radio Card

I have a few mesh nodes that have performance issues. These have been chronic however I have always said it was environmental. Now I can say it was configuration. What? Configuration? How can that be. Well it is understanding the hardware and configuring the software to use the hardware, such that configuring the software to work with hardware. I have a mixture of different radio cards. All of them happen to be prism 2.5 chip set. I have from SMC, Demartech, Senao, Hawkings, and a few others as well. I recently have been buying mini-pci version as well as the PCMCIA version. Each one of these radio cards has dual pin connectors. There rarely is any documentation that comes from b2b purchase. On most of the PCMCIA cards the pin closes to the blinking light is consider to be the top pin. On the Mini PCI cards the inside pin is considered to be the top pin.

Oops. I had the assumption backwards and couldn't figure out why I was getting such poor performance, not for days but for years. Locustworld Wiana gives a person the ability to change the power of the radio card as well as change the diversity. I have always left it on default. Which means the high pin and low pin are both on. Here the problem. Interference on these units was consistent. I received instruction from one of the Locustworld people to change my diversity. Sure enough I saw a negative impact. I had to bring the unit back to the shop because it lost total connectivity to the other meshap. I then figure out that the diversity setting where the opposite in Wiana. How can that be? So I switch my single antenna to a different pin and it worked. Not only well really well. My performance on these units have come from acceptable to exceptional in one easy click.

Sometime it takes years. Now thinking back. I have more entries on poor performance rather than on configuration. Oh well at least I wrote about it!