I should know this but dont
Zosi security cameras, cat5 cables works perfectly, disconnect cable to see wht wifi range is, 300+ feet at night.
During day, dead or intermittent. At 2.4 GHz, sure is not ionospere effects.
Suspect that the Zosi security system wifi receivers cannot discriminate after about 5AM (but still dark) as the local airwaves become more saturated.
Any better explanation? feeling stupid as have not done much wifi rcv/xmit work or other RF above UHF.
Wi-Fi in the 2.4GHz band shares that spectrum with other wireless technologies such as bluetooth and zigbee. If this is in an area that gets more populated during workday hours, but less populated with devices at night, then performance would be expected to be better at night than during the day. This is especially true of high bandwidth devices such as security cameras.
You can as others have suggested use a wifi analyzer app on an android phone to look at how many access points are in the area, which networks they are advertising, and the relative signal strength as seen from your phone, but that won't tell you how congested the spectrum is. The signal strength may not change at all between night and day, but the signal to noise ratio would change, and probably drastically.
Imagine you and one other person (and no one else) in a large gym, standing at opposite corners. You would likely be able to have a conversation with each other without shouting, even an involved conversation with lots of words rapidly exchanged. With another 100 people in the room that are talking as well, you will likely not be able to communicate effectively even if you speak louder than before, but you may be able to understand simple, brief commands if you shout them. Your ability to encode and decode each other's communication was ratcheted way down because the signal to noise ratio was drastically reduced, even if your signal strength was increased, because the noise and interference in the room was much higher than before.
In order to see how busy the spectrum is, You need either a spectrum analyzer such as metageek chanalyzer, which will show the utilization of each channel, or a Wi-Fi packet capture (sniffer) device such as a macbook Pro, so you can capture packets in promiscuous mode and look at how many retransmits are occurring.
Or just use the wired cat5 and eliminate the problems.
