RUCKCast

140 Episodes

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RUCKCast #123: 6 GHz Beacons

2026-09-0122:21

Send us Fan Mail Recorded live from a hotel room — Jim found something in the field worth bringing straight to the podcast. This episode covers 6 GHz beacons, and specifically what happens when an AP's primary channel isn't set to a Preferred Scanning Channel (PSC). Jim walks through the basics of the 6 GHz channel plan — 59 total channels, only 15 PSCs — then digs into the actual discovery: a misconfigured AP will beacon on multiple channels at once (1, 5, 9, 13), using a "duplicate beacon" ...

RUCKCast #122: Wi-Fi Security in Public Places

2026-08-1827:41

Send us Fan Mail Public Wi-Fi means opening yourself up to some risk — airports, hotels, planes, anywhere you don't control the network. Jim uses the August 2026 Delta Flight 591 Wi-Fi incident as the jumping-off point: a rogue network showed up mid-flight mimicking the official service, and the crew shut the whole system down. Jim breaks down what actually happened, why "rogue" isn't even the right term for most of what people call rogue networks, and how an evil twin / deauth attack works i...

RUCKCast #121: The Minimum Problem with Minimum Basic Rates

2026-08-0428:45

Send us Fan Mail You sit down with your design tool, paint coverage to -67 dBm, target 100+ Mbps everywhere, validate it, and present a beautiful heatmap. Then you open the controller and leave the minimum basic rate at 6 Mbps — an MCS 0. Your design says MCS 0 should never happen. So why are you protecting it? In this episode, Jim walks through the real cost of low MBR settings: beacons and management frames burning airtime at the lowest configured rate, multicast traffic crawling while unic...

RUCKCast #120 - What Is The RKS TX VAP Anyways?

2026-07-2130:24

Send us Fan Mail Ever seen a mysterious SSID called RKS-TX-VAP on your 6 GHz radio that you didn't configure and can't connect to? In this episode, Jim breaks down what the RUCKUS Transmit VAP actually is, how it ties into Multi-BSSID, and why it cuts beacon airtime by over 50%. Intro music by Alex Grohl, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRWpx8VJ_E and https://pixabay.com/users/alexgrohl-25289918/

RUCKCast #119 - Stop Mounting Your APs Like You Hate Physics

2026-07-0730:43

Send us Fan Mail The podcast is back. After a year on the road fixing broken networks, Jim's recommitting to RUCKCast — and kicking off the return with the one problem that kept showing up everywhere he traveled: people mounting APs like they hate physics. This one's about outdoor and external antennas — the RUCKUS T-series — and the mistakes that quietly wreck a good design. The big one: everybody's got directional antennas backwards. A directional antenna's real job isn't getting signal whe...

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