The meeting was a session of the WLANPros Wi‑Fi design class, focused on predictive design in Hamina and practical Wi‑Fi considerations. Ferney addressed confusion about the meeting time and shared temporary Hamina licenses with attendees. The group discussed venue costs for a Manchester training and possible alternatives, and alex offered a potential venue in Brazil. Ferney demonstrated Hamina features, including slab-only attenuation, client height, and the use of survey data to inform design. There was extensive discussion on offsets, device variability, and the limitations of predictive vs. measured surveys, with input from Glenn, Martin, Walid Abdelkader, and others. The session covered primary and secondary coverage, AP placement, auto-planning, channel settings, and the impact of obstacles and multi-floor bleed. Ferney emphasized designing for the weakest client device, the importance of redundancy and roaming, and the unreliability of active throughput surveys. The class also touched on real-world examples, such as senior care facilities, warehouses, and stadiums, and compared Hamina, Ekahau, and other tools.

The session was part of the free Wireless LAN Professionals Wi-Fi Design Class, focusing on using Hamina for Wi-Fi design. Ferney led the class, ensuring all participants had temporary Hamina licenses and demonstrating how to create and scale projects, import floor plans, and automatically detect walls, doors, and windows. Jerry from Hamina joined to answer questions about floor attenuation, ceiling heights, and modeling slabs and raised floors, clarifying how these settings affect the 3D model. The group learned to create multi-floor buildings, align floor plans, define scope zones, and model special elements like holes in floors, short walls (verandas), drop ceilings, and air ducts using attenuation objects. Ferney also showed how to copy objects between floors, adjust wall heights, and visualize the environment in 3D. The session highlighted Hamina’s visual interface and ease of use compared to other tools, with participants sharing their impressions and experiences.

In this session, we transition from foundational RF theory into hands-on predictive Wi-Fi design. Using Hamina Wireless, we walk through step by step how to set up a professional predictive model from scratch, using real-world event designs as examples (such as a recent venue deployment in Toronto, Canada). Key technical topics covered in this session include: The Project Lifecycle & AI Detection: How choosing the correct building environment type (office, warehouse, convention center) optimizes Hamina’s AI model for automatic wall and obstacle recognition, Setting the Scale & Coordinates: We cover how the software establishes a pixels-per-meter grid and local XY coordinates, Auto-Draw & Custom Wall Creation: Utilizing the auto-draw feature for automatic material placement, editing material loss values, and creating custom materials, 3D Attenuation Objects & Custom Furniture, Advanced Architectural Features: Step-by-step guidance on constructing multi-landing staircases using the Sloped Floor tool, setting lower/upper height markers, drawing landings (Raised Floors), and enabling structural steps, Windows & Openings.

This was session 361, part of the Wireless LAN Professional Wi-Fi Design Class, where Ferney covered the complete lifecycle of a Wi-Fi project. The session focused extensively on the definition phase, explaining that proper project definition goes far beyond simply installing Wi-Fi everywhere – it requires understanding client requirements, device types and capabilities, cabling infrastructure, budget constraints, vendor selection, power requirements, and physical mounting considerations. Ferney emphasized that Wi-Fi professionals should be involved in all stages of the project lifecycle rather than just being called in for post-deployment surveys when problems arise. The discussion included detailed explanations of design tools like Ekahau, Hamina, and Wavelify, and the importance of pre-deployment validation using “AP on a stick” testing to ensure designs work in real-world conditions. Ferney also clarified the difference between design (predictive simulation) and survey (on-site measurement), and addressed common pitfalls like the “one AP per classroom” approach that often leads to inadequate coverage.

The session focused on the concept of cell overlap in Wi-Fi network design, specifically addressing the fallacy of quantifying cell overlap as a percentage. Ferney explained that the idea of requiring a certain percentage of cell overlap, such as 30%, is not measurable or practical due to the irregular shapes of real-world Wi-Fi coverage areas. He demonstrated using design tools like Ekahau and Hamina to show how secondary coverage, which provides multiple signals for redundancy and roaming, is achieved by adding more access points rather than targeting a specific overlap percentage. The discussion highlighted the need to educate customers and peers to remove such unverifiable requirements from RFPs and contracts. The session also briefly touched on the life cycle of a project, which was postponed for a future discussion.

This was session 359 of Ferney’s free Wi-Fi design class, focusing on Wi-Fi interference terminology and concepts. Ferney explained key Wi-Fi terms including Basic Service Set (BSS), Basic Service Set Identifier (BSSID), Service Set Identifier (SSID), and Extended Service Set (ESS), demonstrating how different access points announce the same SSID using different BSSIDs. The session covered various types of Wi-Fi interference such as Co-Channel Interference (CCI), Adjacent Channel Interference, and Overlapping Basic Service Sets (OBSS), along with protection mechanisms like RTS/CTS. Ferney discussed how most Wi-Fi interference comes from other Wi-Fi networks rather than external sources, and showed examples using Wi-Fi Explorer Pro to analyze interference patterns in real networks. The class included participants from around the world including Australia, France, Sweden, Italy, Chile, Canada, and the United States, with Ferney emphasizing that all session recordings would be made available for free to help train Wi-Fi professionals worldwide.

This was Session 358 of Ferney’s free Wireless LAN Professionals Wi-Fi Design class, focused on the association process in Wi-Fi networks. Ferney explained how devices discover Wi-Fi networks through passive scanning (beacons sent 10 times per second, per radio, per SSID) and active scanning (probe requests sent by clients and probe responses sent by APs), emphasizing that too many networks increase airtime utilization and overhead. The class covered the complete association process from WLAN discovery through open system authentication, association request/response frames, and finally IP address acquisition via DHCP, with Ferney demonstrating real packet captures using Wireshark to show the entire process taking 1.9 seconds. Ferney stressed the importance of keeping the number of SSIDs low to reduce beacon overhead and discussed different authentication methods including PSK and 802.1X, noting that PSK is less secure due to its vulnerability to brute force attacks when passwords are shared among multiple users.