Titan Ranch Ekahau Training

Recently, I got to spend four days attending Ekahau training in Arkansas, at the new Titan Ranch training facility. 

The Titan Ranch happens to be an actual Titan Missile Silo that GT Hill bought and converted to a usable training facility.
This was the first time an actual class was held in the facility.  There were six of us in the inaugural class; an ECSE class taught by Kieth Parsons. 

The first day, when we arrived on site, GT gave us a briefing about the Titan Missile Silo and all that he had to do to open it back up after the military had scraped the facility. The site had been scuttled as part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty(SALT) agreement, back in the 1970's. Part of the scuttling was to cap the silo and the command center. GT has some harrowing tales of all they had to do to open up the command center portion of the facility. 

He's been at it for more than ten years, and he and his family have poured massive amounts of time and energy into recovering the missile center and making it into what it is today.  Which is ...
I was going to say "training facility," but it's much more than that. The area of the Command Center that they have renovated is three levels, or floors of the Command Center for the missile silo. Check out this article from Wired Magazine for pictures of a Titan Missile Silo #Armageddon. 

All floors are connected with a spiral staircase that GT had built with the steel recovered from the site excavation. 

The lowest floor is the largest and that's where we ate and watched old movies, like "War-games" that were displayed on the large wall and were played through a great speaker system. 
The second floor is where the training was held.  This was a most impressive training facility with all the aides an instructor might want when teaching a technical class. It has great lighting control integrated with an Amazon voice control. All the desk were specially designed with power plugs on top of the desks and even phone cradles.  The instructors desk had the controls for everything imaginable right at his fingertips. 
One of the things I really appreciated was that GT has installed a "short-throw" video projector that allows the instructor to display without having to worry about walking in front of the video projection. 

You can tell the room was designed by someone who is familiar with giving classes because that room has everything you need to give a great class - including two huge white boards, which Kieth took full advantage of. 

The third floor is the dome of the facility. It's an acoustical fantasy because you get crazy echo effects when you're up there. It's a smaller room that's unfinished right now, but GT has plans to convert into a bedroom so that they can turn the place into an AirBnB. 
The six of us students had a great time because each training day was broken up with a long lunch break, and GT had different activities for us to do outside. The first day we learned how to skeet shoot. That's right, we went to Arkansas and shot guns; yeehaw!
The other days we had other fun outdoor activities that were of a rugged nature.  We had a Hatchett throw, a drone flying exercise, and some even got to learn how to use an excavator tractor.
The activities were a great way to break up the training and it made the afternoons much more enjoyable.

I have to mention what a great hostess Elizabeth Hill was. She took care of us and showed real Southern Hospitality. Not only did she keep us well fed and even cooked some things for us, she did a lot of the activities with us.  She graciously taught me how to throw an ax, along with cleaning up after us while attending to all the behind the scenes logistics of supporting the class. 
GT and Elizabeth hope to make money on the Titan Ranch, but every time I talked to GT, he was telling me about yet another improvement they (he) want to make to the facility. GT is a visionary, and they already have a great facility. Yes, it's rugged. You have to descend about forty feet down wooden stairs to get in, and if it rains you're going to get mud on your shoes, but it's all part of the experience and it makes it much richer, in my opinion. 
I wish Elizabeth and GT all the success in the world and if the first class is any indication they will do well.

Congratulations on a successful launch!

How Ubiquiti helped me earn my CWNE

Recently I received my CWNE - #308 and, since I certified in a bit of an unorthodox
way, I thought I'd let people know how I did it.  Here's my story.

I started working in Wi-Fi back in 2004. I had started a computer consulting company in Augusta, GA, and a friend of mine asked if I could put wireless in his hotel. I tried and it failed miserably. I used Linksys 802.11b devices and I didn't even know how to crimp cable at the time. But my friend had another friend that owned a hotel and so we tried again, and it got a little better, and eventually I figured it out well enough to get a foothold in the wireless networking business.  At some point I found Ruckus, and things got easier after that.

In 2012 I sold that business and my wife and I moved to Myrtle Beach. We moved into a condo and the homeowners wanted to put wireless in all the buildings. I told them I had some experience in that area and they assigned me the task of finding the best way to do it. I called my old distributor
 and asked for a price on the equipment that it would take to do the job. He told me that there was a new product line that they were introducing called Ubiquiti that he thought might work well and when he told me the price I jumped on it. Ubiquiti was much less expensive than I thought it was going to be, and when I installed it, I found it rather easy to make it work.

Now my curiosity was peeked, and I was on their email list, so when a Ubiquiti class was offered near me I signed up and took the class. Microcom Technologies was hosting the class and they had a great instructor, Kevin Houser, teaching it. He had flown in from San Diego and when I asked him why they hadn't used an East Coast teacher he told me they didn't have one. I told Kevin I thought I'd like to teach and he got me going with Microcom. I took their certification courses and went to work for Microcom teaching classes for Ubiquiti. I then went on and got my CWNA and CWNT and wound up teaching the CWNA quite a bit.

One of the things that helped me understand how Wi-Fi works is the constellation diagrams that Ubiquiti exposes on their AirMax devices.

Ubiquiti shows the constellation diagram for a Point to point connection and from this I learned about the importance of Signal to Noise ratio, the effect of SNR on the MCS rate and the number of bits that are communicated per signal.  Seeing a constellation diagram is a great place to start because you can actually see what's happening on the receiving end.

Another thing you can show with constellation diagrams is the effect of Transmit Power on the data rate. In my class we talk about using the right amount of power to get the desired throughput rate. Usually we can get a 256 QAM at -55.  We then add more power and see that 256 QAM is as fast as we can go. This is usually an "Aha" moment for the students because they can see the number of bits that are represented on the different levels of the MCS. Many Wi-FI concepts come to light with the use of these constellation diagrams and the statistics displayed on the Ubiquiti AirMax devices. 

The funny thing is, Ubiquiti uses TDMA technology in their AirMax line of Access Points. That usually raises the question of; "What's the difference?" And that leads to a discussion of CSMA/CA and the strengths and weaknesses of contention. 

Getting involved in the CWNP got me exposed to the WLAN Pros conferences produced by K Parsons.  There I met several people that helped mentor me on my path to become a CWNE. Devin  Akin and I shared an affinity for Christianity and we became friends. I started following a lot of the Pros on Twitter and got a lot of good insight into the field of Wi-Fi.

Ubiquiti is not considered an Enterprise Wi-Fi solution and I hit a lot of snags trying to apply my primary experience to the Enterprise arena, but getting the basic concept of how Wi-Fi works was a building block that got me started.