Zebra RF guns and cisco AP connectivity

[victoriabardy]

Hello All,

We have a warehouse that is experiencing a number of issues with their zebra scanner RF guns.  The guns are occasionally freezing and having issues roaming.  We have two kinds of Cisco AP in the warehouse, AIR-AP3802I-B-K9 and AIR-CAP3702I-B-K9.

Does anyone here on the forums know of any cisco documentation around compaitbility with these kinds of RF guns?

Any feedback here would be great.

Thank you.

[tcggg0]

We are also using 5 GHz only, but Zebra and Honeywell have suggested disabling UNII-2 and also 802.11ac. Their statement is that the VC70's and 9290' cannot perform 802.11ac.  Perhaps they can with manual intervention, but that has not been tried yet.

[joe.fodor]

yikes yeah I would try checking to see if you can turn on 5ghz on them it might help you out. 

[joshua.kowis]

Thank you everyone for your response. We have fixed the issue by turning
off the 2.4 Ghz radios via profiles applied to the devices and have not had
any further issues.

[MysticFoxDE]

Hi Joe,

"2.4 in a big warehouse with a lot of APs will cause you to have more issues"

sorry friend, but these is completely wrong.
I have equipped several km² of storage area with WiFi for the last 10 years and all of them works fine on 2.4GHz and the mostly with ZEBRA clients. 😉

The using of 2.4GHz in storage areas is much more optimal for the following reasons:

1. The effective range between APP and device is much higher at 2.4GHz than at 5GHz.

2. At 5 GHz, you'll need a higher number of APs to keep track of the same area with a stable signal.

3. The absorption rat of the signal, especially with hydrous materials, is also much higher at 5GHz than at 2.4GHz, whereas the reflection rat is much smaller. Thus you need more APs at 5GHz to fulfill the same purpose at the end of the day if it would be necessary with 2.4 GHz.

4. When using the 5GHz band, most devices consume much more power than when operating at 2.4GHz.

Disable the feature on AP that force the clients to connect to 5GHz band, then the ZEBRAs should run fine.

Newer is not always better. 😉

Regards from Germany

Alex

[GVD]

that would work if you only have scanners in those area's.

If you use different devices that all use 2,4 you have a bigger chance to run into issues.

Weirdly enough some of the posts sound familiar. Zebra also recommended to only enable the UNII1-2 channels (the first 8 channels). I don't understand why they would bring a 5Ghz capable device to the market, but then say we can only use half of the channels.

[terryfarmer]

To resolve our issue we enable all 5 GHz channels except 165 and had our end users test.

[GVD]

Hi Terry,

out of curiosity, how did you come to that solution? Vendor advice or did you have interference on that channel?

[MysticFoxDE]

Hi Terry,

where you want to enable all channels, on the APs or on the Device?

With the APs I would strongly advise against it.

I would also never recommend activating all channels on the devices either, this only worsens the rooming behavior, because the device has to constantly scan all channels.

It is always best to use fixed and above all matching channels on both the APs and the clients. At 2.4 GHz the best recommendation is to use channel 1, 6, 11.

At 5 GHz i recommend to use 36, 48, 60.

In any case, channels from the 36-64 range, this is where the clients are most compatible.

Best Regards from Germany

Alex

[terryfarmer]

Alex,

Thanks for the tips. To be honest we took this as an initial troubleshooting test since we were never able to get the HH to connect on to the warehouse WAPs on 5Ghz. We did notice that they would connect to "some" WAPs so we decided to check the HH's channel configuration thinking that the HH was looking for a certain range of channels. The users initial tests have been good we are waiting for them to report back later this week as to how the roaming is working between campuses.