4. Set up the radio
Two things to describe here: what is transmitting, and what is listening. Both matter, and the second one is the half people forget.
The access point
Band, channel and width
| Band | Range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4 GHz | reaches furthest, three usable channels | crowded everywhere, and shared with Bluetooth, microwaves and everything else |
| 5 GHz | the sensible default | much more spectrum, shorter reach through walls |
| 6 GHz | most spectrum, cleanest air | indoor only and low power in both ETSI and FCC territory, and only recent devices support it |
Width trades range against speed. Doubling the width doubles the data rate and costs exactly 3 dB of range, because the noise you collect scales with bandwidth. On 2.4 GHz, do not use 40 MHz: there is not enough room, and you will simply collide with your neighbours.
The app checks whatever you pick against the regulatory limits for your domain and tells you if the configuration is not allowed, which channel needs radar detection, and which band is indoor only.
Power
Set the conducted power, which is what the radio delivers to the antenna connector, plus any cable loss. The app adds the antenna gain to get EIRP and compares that against your regulatory ceiling.
This distinction trips people up. A box that says "20 dBm" might mean 20 dBm conducted or 20 dBm EIRP, and those differ by the antenna gain. If you get it wrong you will be off by two or three decibels.
The AI lookup button
There is a button that writes a research brief for your exact router model. You take that text to whatever AI assistant you use, bring the answer back, and the app parses it.
It then does something useful: it reconciles the conducted power against the EIRP and against your regulatory ceiling, and afterwards it tells you exactly which fields it accepted and which are still your own values. So you can see what it actually changed rather than trusting it wholesale.
The app makes no network calls of its own. You do the asking, which means nothing about your project leaves your machine.
Antenna
- Isotropic radiates equally in all directions. Not a real antenna, useful as a reference.
- Dipole is the standard whip, 2.15 dBi, a doughnut with a null along its own axis.
- Collinear stacks several dipoles to flatten that doughnut, trading vertical coverage for horizontal reach. This is what most "high gain" router antennas are. Note the consequence: a high-gain omni is worse directly above and below itself, which matters in a house with more than one floor.
- Sector is a directional panel, for ceiling and wall mounted access points.
How it is mounted
This one has more effect than people expect, and it sets two things at once: the antenna's natural orientation and whatever the signal has to get through immediately.
| Mounting | Height | Enclosure loss |
|---|---|---|
| Free standing on a table | 0.75 m | none |
| On top of a shelf | 1.8 m | none |
| Inside a closed wooden cabinet | 1.2 m | 2.4 dB |
| Inside a cabinet with glass doors | 1.2 m | 1.5 dB |
| Inside a metal cabinet or rack | 1.2 m | 25 dB, and see below |
| Wall mounted | 2.0 m | none |
| Ceiling mounted | 2.4 m | none, antennas hang down |
| Behind a TV or monitor | 1.1 m | 6 dB |
The enclosure loss is not a fudge factor. It is the one-way transmission loss of the material actually in front of the antenna, computed from the same ITU-R P.2040 build-ups the walls use, and the app tells you which build-up each figure came from.
It costs more than it looks, because it applies in every direction, before any wall loss. Two decibels off a cabinet door is two decibels off everywhere, and no amount of moving the router around the room recovers it.
The metal rack figure is the exception and it is honest about being a placeholder. Signal does not go through sheet metal, it leaks out through seams and openings, so the real number depends entirely on how open your rack is. If you are planning a rack installation, do not trust 25 dB. Put the antennas outside the rack.
The client
This is the half people skip, and skipping it is why so many coverage maps disagree with what a phone actually shows.
A phone in your hand and a laptop on a desk see different maps. Different height, different antenna orientation, and your own body is in the way of one of them.
The settings
Height. The map is computed at one height above the floor. 1.1 m is a reasonable "phone in hand while sitting" value. Set 0.8 m for a desk, or 1.5 m for standing.
Antenna and receive chains. The number of chains caps how many spatial streams the link can use, together with the access point's own count. Two is typical for a phone, two or three for a laptop.
Noise figure. How much noise the receiver adds. 7 dB is a fair figure for consumer silicon. Lower is a better receiver.
Body loss. What your hand and body absorb. Use 0 for something fixed on a shelf, and 3 to 6 dB for a phone held in a hand. This is a real effect and it is large enough to move a room from working to not.
Chipset margin. How many decibels better than a just-compliant receiver your device is. 0 dB models a device that only meets the IEEE minimum sensitivity; 5 dB gives back the whole implementation allowance that the standard builds into those figures. Raising it lowers the SNR that every rate needs, so raising it is optimistic.
The panel shows you the consequence live: how many decibels of SNR the lowest and highest modulations need at your current setting. If you are not sure, leave it at 5.
Neighbouring networks
Add the networks around you and the app will include them as interference, which changes the SINR and therefore the achievable rate.
You need each one's channel, width and roughly how strong it is where you measured it. Any Wi-Fi analyser app will tell you. The app back-solves a transmit power from the level you observed at the point you observed it, then propagates that neighbour through your model like any other source.
This is what makes the channel plan meaningful rather than theoretical.