Cloaking ?????

[simcor23]

Can anyone explain what cloaking actually does. I know that it uses different channel spacing ie: 20mhz to 10 or 5Mhz. Makes it virtually invisible to packet sniffers for the time being. But what is its purpose how does it work specifically and the most important question when and when not to use it?

[lonnie]

Normal spacing is 20 MHz and channel separation is 20 MHz. Let's take 2.4 GHz to make it easier to see the BIG picture.

Normal 20 MHz means you have 3 channels, at 1, 6, and 11, that do not overlap.

Set your unit to 5 MHz and you have the RF bandwidth at 1/4 the size thus you can now have 5 MHz spaced channels that do not overlap. Instead of 1,6,11 you now have 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 that you can use and not have overlap. Since the modulation is a form of OFDM it is more efficient and you can still obtain about 7 mbps throughput. That means your 2.4 GHz band can now support 77 mbps of data whereas the previous 20 MHz wasteful way was about 16 to 18 mbps on the 3 channels.

As you pointed out, they cannot be seen, which means poachers now have nothing to try and snoop.

[simcor23]

That is very cool. So basically I would want cloaking in every situation I currently have cloaking x4 on a WAR ap and WAR clients (actually 2 AP's and 5 clients) I was just wondering if there was a situation where I would not want cloaking as I saw a couple of posts where cloaking x2 was suggested for longer links, does cloaking help with distance? Would cloaking help at all with interference or general radio noise? And lastly when I put cloaking x4 my association list client client changed from 48Mbps and 54Mbps to 12 and 13.5 or something like that. Does that mean each 5Mhz spacing gets 12 or 13.5 equalling 48 and 54 (12x4=48 and 13.5x4=54?) because actuall throughput doesn't seem to change when I do download and upload speed tests.