Quick comment about an issue that showed up a few days back. Only issue I've had from early days of pre release LEDE to current 17.01.2. Been running the most recent for 4-5 days.
I was trying different channel settings on the 5Ghz AC radio. It seemed like when I changed to a certain channel and sent the change (from LUCI), the radio went into a disabled mode. (even though it wasn't set disabled in LUCI) Nothing would bring it back after that. Finally, a reboot of the router brought it back up again.
Another unusual thing, I noticed the TX power available settings changed. Suddently, much higher power settings appeared, higher than what had been seen before. On both the 2.4Ghz and the 5Ghz radios. Then, they went back to the lower limits I'd been seeing before, or at least the 5Ghz did.
I saved some log info, and can give more details. Anyone have any ideas?
When you switch to a channel that requires radar detection, the radio listens for any radar activity for a time (I think 60 seconds) before going on air.
Same thing occurs to me for non DFS channels. I'll test again because I've set it and forget it on channel 40 once functional and never bothered changing it since LEDE Reboot.
Are you talking about the availability of settings in Luci or actual measured TX power values from an external device ? Different channels are allowed different TX power. Can you issue the UCI command:
iw list | grep dBm
Edit: @JonP I did tests on channel change for the 5GHz band and it seems that my issue is not longer present using LEDE 17.01.2. Some channels would not work (e.g. the last channel set was sticking), but I could revert back to other channels without having to reboot the router. I never use DFS channels so I didn't test them.
It went away, and didn't come back. Not for a minute, gone for hours till I rebooted. So, probably not a DFS thing.
I'd also guess the lost 5Ghz and the power changes are separate issues.
I had thought the power changes might have been due to a channel change, but they seemed to not consistently change with them, when I went back and forth. Other thought was could the country setting be getting changed somehow, as a bug? But I have no idea how to check status of that.
Late here, will try getting that info on channel status tomorrow.
Oh, and I did try to see if the power level change was actual, by measuring with a wifi app and phone. Don't have a decent measuring instrument for wifi frequencies... Hard to be sure, but it looked like I didn't always get the higher power indicated.
Hmmm... interesting that the problem seemed to disappear for you when you changed to 17.01.2. I had my issue on 17.01.2. Been busy, and haven't had much time where I wouldn't have complaints with having to bring the house Net access up and down. But I did get my power list for the thread.
Poked around with it a bit tonight, and I do see different power level maximum values in LUCI when I switch to different channels. Currently trying out ch149 at 30dbm (that's 1W!)
That's a pretty large spread on 5Ghz, 5200-5800Mhz BTW. I've wondered if the antennas work better at one end of the band or the other, one of the things I was trying to figure out, when I ran into the dropped 5Ghz service...
FWIW, I've found a site talking about which channels to best use for 80mhz channel width, not sure if it applies to all devices/LEDE, or just Cisco, but it sheds some light on the subject if it is a description of how all 5Ghz wifi devices work.
So far, haven't had a recurrence of the dropped 5Ghz service. IIRC, it happened down in the low end of the band, haven't been poking around there lately. I could imagine some logic where if the power level is too high, disable the radio, and another bug where going from a high band channel to a low band channel doesn't reapply the low channel limit. But I'd be guessing. Might try testing for that later.
In fact, I don't really know if it's 17.01.2 because, as I said, I've set it up once when I first installed LEDE Reboot, and never changed it to something else. So there is a possibility that it could also be between those releases.
I must confess that some channels, like 48 and 165, are simply not working at all, but I can change it to another channel without having to reboot. Maybe those channels are Hardware restricted for my country.
Yep... You should get that listing of your channel specs. Find a wifi frequency list that covers different countries, and you'll know what's allowed in your area