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Improving Windows 7 WLAN Associate/Disassociate Aggressiveness

Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2016 12:07 am
by arizonajon
Hi guys -

My setup in the truck has another function besides being a wardriving platform (what??? say it ain't so!!!). The Mobius dashcam is used by a program called Yawcam to grab a still every 20 seconds or so and attempt to FTP it to my server at jonadams.com. And being Windows, it's very non-aggressive with associating and then disassociating from an AP. For instance, when I pull away from the house, the computer may take a minute or two being out of range of the rooftop AP before it will realize that and show the little fuzzy orange ball in front of the WLAN icon in the system tray, indicating that it's not connected, but there are connections available. And then other times, it will connect to something like "CoxWiFi" or "CableWiFi" APs around town and will never gracefully disconnect, instead throwing a bright yellow/black exclamation point atop the WLAN icon.

I'd like the WLAN to be relatively aggressive in its behavior, and to quickly drop the connection if things aren't good. Any ideas on how to make that so? Oh, and do this while continuing to allow Vistumbler to do its job?

Cheers - Jon N7UV

Improving Windows 7 WLAN Associate/Disassociate Aggressiveness

Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2016 9:43 am
by arizonajon
An approach that perhaps could be an option within Vistumbler, since it's already reading the netsh command all the time, would be a new tab that specifies "friend" networks that may be associated to when available and above a certain signal strength. That way, when Vistumbler is finding that "CoxWiFi" has an RSSI above a certain threshold (e.g., -80 dBm or whatever %) it should tell Windows to try to associate. Note that Windows will do this itself if the network is in the allowed list, but it takes its sweet time, and for a moving vehicle, time is distance... If the RSSI drops below that threshold for more than a given number of loop times, then it forces a disassociate.

Improving Windows 7 WLAN Associate/Disassociate Aggressiveness

Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2016 2:51 pm
by pferland
It sounds possible, would be up to Andrew if it something he would like to implement.

-Phil