Five Person Drive team in 2017

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Jpatterson1710

Yeah, the "Christmas Tree" is primarily why FIRST has updated the radio. The old D-Link radios failed to implement proper WiFi protocols, nor could they enforce bandwidth caps. Basically, WiFi protocol says that when packets are being dropped, the rate at which those packets are sent must be reduced, and the rate at which they are backed off must be random. The issue with the D-Link was that the rate at which they backed off was hard-coded as a set number. Therefore when the network got crowded and packets were dropped, all the radios on the field backed off and then tried to re-send packets at the same time. If you can imagine, that is exactly why the rate should be random, and thats why we saw the "Christmas Tree". Among other things, one of the major improvements with our new radio is that it does in fact back off at a random rate, following proper WiFi protocol. That said, the "Christmas Tree" is not impossible with the new radios, but it would be a very surprising. I personally don't know of a single occurrence it last year, and adding six feeds really shouldn't have much effect on the likely hood of a "Christmas Tree" type of occurrence.

Had we not updated radios, I would totally agree with you. Six additional feeds with the D-Link would absolutely increase the occurrence of the "Christmas Tree" among other things.

If anyone has more questions about what the "Christmas Tree" is(symptoms, causes, fixes) or if you'd like to hear why the recent changes are fixing this issue, feel free to PM me or quote/reply. I'd be happy to answer your questions!

At one of my events I scorekept at this year (I'd like to say warren district but my memory is shot) we did get a christmas tree due to Wifi interference (other networks on the same 5G channel), which was fixed by swapping WiFi channels.

That said, the new radios, from a field management point of view, were really awesome indeed. I'll take one christmas tree over an entire year over the mess the year before was. Especially during my stint on Hopper Field in 2015, where we suffered more christmas trees than the holiday section at Walmart.