DFS Channel Selection Frustration

[news]

[wireless]

Good day all.
This post is part rant and part question. Short version; I live in a condo which means WiFi channels are crowded, even the 5GHz band U-NII-1 and U-NII-3 are busy. I've seen upwards of 24 AP's on channel 44 alone. The 2.4 GHz band I gave up on months ago (turn off). My WiFi analyzer has consistently recommended (about 95% of the time) channel 60 for me. The problem starts with my T3200M gateway NOT showing any DFS channels at all. Even when set to "Auto Select" and hitting the "rescan" button. It was only by accident that I did a hard reboot (removed power) from the gateway for 30 seconds did the router pick channel 132, hurray! A channel all by myself, at least for a few days. No biggie that a couple of others "discovered" channel 132. The thing is, when I look at available channels in the router settings, channel 132 and all other DFS channels do not show up. But I'm on channel 132, so I'm confused. Just out of curiosity, I hit "rescan" and the router kept me on 132. I then powered off the gateway for 30 seconds and when all the lights came back on, I was now on channel 100. Just as good as 132 so that's okay.

So here are the questions, is there a way to 'force' DFS channel selection? In my case, I want channel 60 as recommended by the analyzer. Why does the T3200M not show and DFS channels in the available channel window? Lastly, doing a hard reboot on the gateway to get it to switch channels seems silly when that should happen when doing a rescan of channels. Maybe its time I purchased my own router to gain full control of settings if nothing more can be done with the T3200M.

PS: I know about weather radar on channels 120-128 which may be a non-issue now since Canada switched to the S-Band four years ago.


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