Recently i got my hands on an Omada EAP787. This is one of the newest Wi-Fi 7 access points in the productline of Omada. The EAP787 has an ethernet interface of 1x 10Gbps but can fall-back to 2,5 or 1Gbps. From a practical perspective I would think an ethernet connection of 2.5Gbps would be more than sufficient to provide a tri-band connection for a wireless network, for sure if you think you need to perform medium contention. It operates as a 2×2 on 2.4GHz, 4×4 on 5GHz and 2×2 on 6GHz with resp. 4 – 5 – 5dBi gain.
I have been using Omada EAP773 a lot before but this new EAP787 has a new functionality, the EAP787 has dedicated antennas for RF scanning, to be able to use this RF scanning function you need an Omada controller with at least v6.0
With the RF scanning functionality i can provide a detailed config for the WLAN optimization. With the latest Omada controller firmware version 1.34.15
RF Scan test
To check how my clients behave when i do a manual RF scan i connected 3 clients to this access point, an iPhone, an iPad and a MBP.
From the access point view in the controller I had a clear view of all the functionality for this device. For this test I needed to go into Statistics to run an RF Scan
Once you start the RF Scan, the Omada GUI will warn you that you might loose Wi-Fi client connectivity. Let’s try this in our own config with 3 clients connected, I this case I run an RF scan on 5GHz and 6GHz
During the RF scan test you can clearly see the access point is scanning the channels; during the scan you will see the SSID on 6GHz jumping from channel to channel. Using Wi-Fi explorer i noticed it jumped from channel 33 to 73 to 69
But in the meantime my clients stay connected on 6GHz to this access point
The scan for the full 5 & 6GHz band took the system 8m 59s but it gave me this result back, now I have a clear view of the channels in use for this environment. By clicking on the channels I get some more information about these channels
In that view above you do notice something is happening on channel 53 in 6GHz, but channel utilization is low. If I open Wifi explorer view I found there is an Aruba access point with a 320MHz wide channel using channel 53 as its primary channel.
Overall i like the improvement with these Omada access points, looking forward to the next test with a few access points where i can provide a directional signal.
