Part 1.
I had been thinking about retiring my much loved Squeezebox system - I needed another player, and buying second hand was the only option to stay with Squeeze. I saw a play:1 on display in Peter Jones, and having given it some thought over a day or so, bought a Play:1 from Amazon.co.uk to see how it worked - unfortunately it didn't.
I live in a large-ish brick built house, far enough from my neighbours so that I don't pick up any Wifi interference. Over the years I have got my Wifi to the point it is rock solid, 3 separate wireless access points at strategic positions through the house give me complete '3 bars plus' coverage no matter where you are in the house.
As I found early on with Wifi - it is a pretty poor standard for all but close range communication. The allocated radio band is too narrow and the channels (1 to 11 in the US, 1 to 13 in Europe, 1 to 14 in Japan), overlap so that nearby channels of similar strength will interfere. Channels separated by at least '5' are considered to be non-overlapping (they do, but the overlap is limited), so the standard mantra on any US based website is use channels 1,6,11 as they are non-overlapping and should give best performance. This is of course nonsense. 2 and 7 don't overlap, 3 and 8 and so on. In Europe, better performance than 1,6,11 can be had by using channels 1,7,13 (even less overlap) or if you can live with some problems at marginal signal levels, 1,5,9,13 give a good choice to squeeze 4 channels into the band. I had chosen 1,7,13 for my three access points to give best Wifi performance through the house.
I was trying to set up my new Play:1 in my office which was covered by a wireless access point on channel 13. It transpired that my new Play:1 couldn't pick up channel 13.
I had been thinking about retiring my much loved Squeezebox system - I needed another player, and buying second hand was the only option to stay with Squeeze. I saw a play:1 on display in Peter Jones, and having given it some thought over a day or so, bought a Play:1 from Amazon.co.uk to see how it worked - unfortunately it didn't.
I live in a large-ish brick built house, far enough from my neighbours so that I don't pick up any Wifi interference. Over the years I have got my Wifi to the point it is rock solid, 3 separate wireless access points at strategic positions through the house give me complete '3 bars plus' coverage no matter where you are in the house.
As I found early on with Wifi - it is a pretty poor standard for all but close range communication. The allocated radio band is too narrow and the channels (1 to 11 in the US, 1 to 13 in Europe, 1 to 14 in Japan), overlap so that nearby channels of similar strength will interfere. Channels separated by at least '5' are considered to be non-overlapping (they do, but the overlap is limited), so the standard mantra on any US based website is use channels 1,6,11 as they are non-overlapping and should give best performance. This is of course nonsense. 2 and 7 don't overlap, 3 and 8 and so on. In Europe, better performance than 1,6,11 can be had by using channels 1,7,13 (even less overlap) or if you can live with some problems at marginal signal levels, 1,5,9,13 give a good choice to squeeze 4 channels into the band. I had chosen 1,7,13 for my three access points to give best Wifi performance through the house.
I was trying to set up my new Play:1 in my office which was covered by a wireless access point on channel 13. It transpired that my new Play:1 couldn't pick up channel 13.