Wireless Networking • TX power in UK

I got my hAP ax2 at home to learn Router OS 7 and also experiment with Wi-Fi 6/Wave2. It's been an interesting ride so far. Today I've been looking at the real world effects of placement of a router in a typical UK house - effect of thick stone walls, through floors, plasterboard walls etc.

Using the excellent Android Wi-Fi analyser, I factory reset the router so it was a pretty clean configuration and took screenshots of various signal strengths. This is me sat with my phone about 2m from the router, clear-ish line of sight:



I then restored the router back to it's day to day working configuration and noticed immediately that the signal strength lost ~10db, which is a reasonable amount:



Digging around I discovered that as per my normal configuration instructions, I'd set the country to UK. Never realised it made so much difference to transmit speed. On 5GHz it reduces the TX power from 26 down to 18.

I assume this is because of UK regulations? What units is TX power measured in?

I was also surprised to learn than the TX power varies depending upon the frequency. 5180GHz is 26 but 5260 is a little lower at 22. You live and learn! I also note that whilst you can reduce the TX power, you can't force it higher

Statistics: Posted by robmaltsystems — Fri Jan 12, 2024 7:54 pm

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