I am using the Photon in a system which will be located in a farm field and am working with the access point antenna.
Has anyone looked into what kind of Wi-Fi signal is required to maintain a reliable connection with the Photon, in terms of RSSI dBm ?
I have several installed on job sites with rssi values at ~ -78 that stay connected and work reliably.
Outside and away from ‘2.4GHz clutter’ for example Bluetooth, other WAPs, hotspots, etc. and people you will probably get a pretty stable signal strength. RSSI isn’t the only thing that determines reliable connection, there is also data quality. It is worth monitoring the RSSI value for a while to see if weak signal or dips correlates with Particle Cloud connection drops. You can make RSSI a Particle.variable and then set up a device monitor to dump it into a CSV file together with a timestamp.
Yes, I have been watching those. SNR is a solid, 30-40dB, or better. My sense is that at least on my test unit RSSI < -75 dBm is where things start to get slightly uncertain. I was thinking maybe that should be a bit better.
Are you using an external antenna? If not I would recommend for the cost involved you will get much better signal and connection uptime.
Yes, my question was based on confirming how much antenna I should need. I just put in an 11.5dBi omni vertical on the barn that does a pretty good job. I was hoping to get a better idea of how much signal I should want to be seeing at my Photon out in the field in order to have a reliable connection with adequate fade margin.