Offseason event Wifi suggestions?

[frasnow]

On Saturday my team went to an offseason event where there were major Wi-Fi connection issues for the majority of teams. I’m hoping people who have run offseason events can give some suggestions about the cause and how the event can be better next year.

It was a combined FRC and FTC event in a university basketball arena. The FTC field was using a field management system, while the FRC field was not. Prior to the beginning of the match my team ran a number of successful autonomous practices and tested our minibot deployment from across the field. We were in the first FRC match and it was about to start when all of the robots suddenly started having connection problems. There never really was a good match for us. We ran autonomous pretty successfully, but once we drove half-way across the field at the beginning of telop, we’d start to drop our connection randomly. We’d continue to drop our connection as we tried to score a tube and it was clear other teams were having similar issues.

Many suggestions were made about the cause of the Wi-Fi issues:

• The openness of the basketball arena
• The FTC field management system (they were having connection problems too)
• The university’s Wi-Fi
• The robots sharing the same Wi-Fi channel (changing this helped some, but wasn’t perfect)
• Routers not being set to N only
• The chicken wire in front of the drivers
• The university’s Mars Rover being demoed (one of our students suggested this as a joke)

There is one thing I should mention about how teams were connecting. Some teams used their D-link on bridge mode with a router and some teams used their D-link on access point. Teams using their D-link on access point had to setup tables at the side of the field in order to get a connection. My team had a router.

Needless to say, I was disappointed the event didn’t go better since it was so good last year. Last year it took place inside of a room that was not much bigger than the FRC and FTC fields. For us the event was in town, but I really feel bad for the teams that travelled five hours to get there.

Any suggestions from people who have run offseason events? Or threads I should read on this subject?