Would be super useful for locating interference if with the click of a button the AP could trigger ALL it’s SM’s into, say, a 60 second spectrum analyzer, during which the AP goes “dark” and analyzes too.
Recently we had another operator fire up Part 90 equipment in the 3GHz band that we had the CBRS PAL for, and it took us a couple days to locate the link to determine who it belonged to in order to get them to move to an unlicensed or GAA channel.
A function as suggested would have allowed us to put ~150 SM’s and a dozen AP’s into spectrum in a matter of a minutes to “triangulate” on the source of interference.
Great idea! Which is why we already implemented “Sector Spectrum Analyzer” on the AP and it does exactly what you said.
Sector Spectrum Analyzer tells every connected SM to run a Spectrum Analysis for the configured duration and channel bandwidth. The AP also runs a SA and is dark during this time so that the SMs don’t see the energy from its connected AP. Then the SMs all connect back to the original AP and you can view the results from the “Remote Spectrum Analyzer” page or download the results from all the radios in XML form.
It is recommended to launch this from a SNMP script and do all the APs at tower or even region at the same time. Then you can have all your APs go dark and see what else is operating out there.
We had this feature with the canopy units, unfortunately this also caused the SM’s to reboot but it could be done.
The full sector spectrum scan that is currently implemented is not the same as an all units scan. An All units scan may not be viably controlled from an AP but since cnMaestro does not display spectrum scans yet (hint!) you basically are better off using a narrow aperture directional antenna and a mobile spectrum analyzer which defeats part of the usefulness of having radios that have a spectrum scan feature.
