Best Practice for AP settings in Stick Survey

[Erik Ekman]

When doing Stick Survey I use a 9120 with EWC or a 2802 with MobilityExpress, mount it on a camera stand and use Ekahau with sidekick to measure signal strength and other various metrics. But how does my settings in the AP really reflect how RRM will eventually configure the transmit power on the APs?

By default, signal strength in EWC is maximized. Should you leave it like that or tune it down a bit? Is there a best practice for this?

[ammahend]

you basically never know for sure how RRM will eventually configure the transmit power on the APs.

you set your power manually on both radios and do survey, if you dont get satisfactory result, then you change power again and repeat the process till you know, what power setting best works for your environment in terms of coverage, then you use this information to tune your RRM setting. 

RRM is just a baseline, in almost all deployment, some RRM tuning is needed based on your survey. 

not knowing about your environment, for survey I would set radios to 10-12% of supported power at 2.4 and 12-17% of supported power on 5Ghz and 17-20% of supported power on 6Ghz and then go up or down on power from here, making sure cell size is same for all 3 bands.  

[Erik Ekman]

Thank for the reply.

Regarding the environment, we normally do stick surveys in complex locations with big machines and such, where floor plans does not contain the information needed for a simulation. My question was in general, I did not have a specific location in mind.

Why so low on the transmit power, would not 10-20% create REALLY small cells? I was thinking more in terms of changing 1 to 2 (half the power), just to give RRM more wiggle room. 

[ammahend]

If 20% of transmit power will create a small cell size will depends on your environment, if you put an AP in an open area, that much power can cover more than 1/4 football field at -72dBm. 
the idea was to start small and expand or start big and shrink power, either method will work, eventually you want to reach a value that works for your environment. 
additionally you want to design for failures also, if an AP fails other APs have enough TX power to expand and cover that area.