[Home networking] Setting my Ruckus APs to DFS channels manually, any chance of running afoul of the FCC?
Hi everyone, I recently finally setup the Ruckus AP unleased system that came with my townhome. After spending a long night learning how to properly configure the system I finally set it up in a way that provided me the best speeds/range without interference.
This was achieved by setting my Ruckus APs to manually sit on the DFS channels (60-140) via the Ruckus configuration app (shown here)
This has been working great as I'm avoiding the 10~ other wifi networks in the area that are all set to the standard 36-48 and 149-160 channels (wifi analyzer screenshot here) but I'm concerned I may be inadvertently violating FCC guidelines. Note I do not live near any military installations, but I am about 13 miles away from a major airport. Will the Ruckus APs automatically change channels if they detect radar interference or am I causing trouble for someone?
DFS channels can be used, but there are rules around them and the software in your AP is probably coded to follow those rules:
https://wifinc.net/dfs-channels-and-why-to-avoid-them-even-though-you-say-you-cannot/
I used to only use DFS channels for 5ghz networking in my house, but eventually I came around and now avoid them like the plague. Largely due to the issues detailed in the blog post above. When your APs are forced to switch DFS channels, it takes... forever. Whereas if you use non-DFS channels things happen way way quicker.
I haven't had any events where I've been forced off DFS yet, though I've only had the system running for about 4 days. I'm hoping that's just because there hasn't been any interference, and not because the APs are ignoring FCC regulations and broadcasting on the DFS channels regardless.
Yeah so I live about 10 miles from the local airport and depending on the DFS channel I used, sometimes I would actually get radar events which would force everything to drop and to switch to another channel. The Unifi Network software is good about recording and relaying information when things like that happen, so I was eventually able to find DFS channels where these incidents occurred way less often.
Despite that, I still ended up dumping them because the rules around DFS channels make your network much slower to react and reconfigure itself when something does go wrong with a DFS channel and that was excruciating at times. Switching to non-DFS channels gave me a much better experience, though my wifi speed isn't quite as fast either (presumably due to non-DFS channels being more congested).
Thanks for the lived experience! I'll run them like this for a while and see if I have any of the same issues, if it does seem like its a problem I can easily swap back to the regular channels and just eat the speed hit. I was more concerned about breaking the law rather than running into reliability issues haha
If you login and go to System, Diagnostics you can poke around in the logs (or download them or forward them to your syslog server, etc) and see if there are DFS events, an example at the forums:
Apr 27 02:27:55 2819 daemon.info channel-wifi1: Pausing 10 minutes (DFS related)
No DFS events showing up there yet, once again I'm hoping this is because is because there haven't been any radar pings detected, and not because I'm violating FCC guidelines haha
You're fine; if you look around the Ruckus forums you'll see people who have had great use of DFS channels. Others who had it working for a long time then something changed in air traffic (or maybe satellite downlink) and they went away.
If you do find issues, the logs may show that it's a subset of the DFS channels in your area that are the problem and you can then manually deselect those channels for faster channel selection.
Speaking from experience, stay away from DFS channels. Your AP will disable them when it detects radar or whatever, and either fallback to another channel, or just stop working if those non-DFS channels are all disabled. I don’t believe your ruckus is capable of ignoring those rules (and it would be illegal to sell if it did)
It was a nightmare for me with a mish-mash of devices (windows machines, macbook, android, iphones) all having problems all the time with DFS channels, due to dropouts relating to the channel switching process.
Ive been running for about 4 days now with no dropout issues, perhaps I am in an area without those concerns? I don't know much about it, but as long as I'm not encountering reliability issues, there doesn't seem to be any reason to stay off the DFS? The tradeoff is rough too considering how congested the non-dfs channels are as I live in a townhome and have a lot of neighbors.