Planes affecting WiFi?

MikeHunt79 · 20 Aug 2009 at 18:49

I've been doing some big uploads today, I was getting dropouts, my wifi would disconnect and reconnect...

I didn't know what was causing it until I found that almost everytime a plane comes over my wireless drops out... Why is this?

I live near an airport, and the planes come over pretty low...

Dreadhead · 20 Aug 2009 at 19:00

Yeah I have observed the same at my parents house, only there it effects their cordless phones rather than wifi.

They live near Brize Norton airfield, the phone signal tends to completely drop-out whenever the large VC-10s take off or come in to land. With smaller aircraft, the signal just gets patchy.

No idea what causes it unfortunately.

Rroff · 20 Aug 2009 at 19:10

Planes have quite a few high power tranmissions for navigation, communication, etc. so I expect something is putting out enough power to cause too much noise for the wifi to hold the connection - even if its not directly saturating the frequency the wifi is on.

You might also want to use inSSIDer (metageek) to map other wireless users in the area to make sure your not overlapping someone else.

MikeHunt79 · 20 Aug 2009 at 22:20

Dreadhead said:
Yeah I have observed the same at my parents house, only there it effects their cordless phones rather than wifi.

They live near Brize Norton airfield, the phone signal tends to completely drop-out whenever the large VC-10s take off or come in to land. With smaller aircraft, the signal just gets patchy.

No idea what causes it unfortunately.

The planes near my house are just your run of the mill airliners... I guess they're causing interference somehow...

Rroff said:
Planes have quite a few high power tranmissions for navigation, communication, etc. so I expect something is putting out enough power to cause too much noise for the wifi to hold the connection - even if its not directly saturating the frequency the wifi is on.

You might also want to use inSSIDer (metageek) to map other wireless users in the area to make sure your not overlapping someone else.

I've already had a quick go with netstumbler and a laptop wandering around the garden, 2 of my neighbours have wifi also, but on different channels. I guess this is ok?

It is annoying tho, my wireless signal isn't very good anyway, so I think I may try one of those huge +5db aerials and see if this fixes things...