Is the trick that you get to talk directly to the printer about why they're always the worst?

Oops, it's that thing you plug into that totally normal looking printer completely isolated from the network, my bad!!!

Ah yes, the standard STRK, SYST, ALARK, MAINT, PWR, and 9 ports of the Cisco Catalyst 9850. This is really helpful to have port aggregation groups with a size of 1 (completely missing the point of link aggregation) to demonstrate the clear difference between LACP and PAgp. Useful. Love this!

The higher the SNR, the better the modulation scheme available (which dictates how much data Wi-Fi can transmit in a transmission). Typical design targets a minimum of 20 dB for SNR, with 35 dB supporting higher order modulation. Too much power can cause issues, though,which I'll share another time.

The SNR (Signal to Noise) ratio is a comparison between how much signal power and how much noise there is. In this example, there is -42 dBm of signal, and -88 dBm of noise. That's a relative difference of 46 dB between them. (In other words, the signal level is 40000 times greater than the noise)

So that's the scale of changes which we can translate to real values, but what is a 'good' value in Wi-Fi? The answer is complicated and I can share more about it in later posts, but I will say that surprisingly more power isn't always good. In fact, it can cause issues. The critical value is SNR.

If you *really* want to get to exactly -42 dBm you can. That precision isn't required, but:

-43 dBm = .00005 mW (50 nW)
-33 dBm = .0005 mW (500 nW)
-36 dBm = .00025 mW (250 nW)
-39 dBm = .000125 mW (125 nW)
-42 dBm = .0000625 mW (62.5 nW)

The point of it is that you can see the relative change!

0 dBm = 1 mW
-10 dBm = .1 mW (100 uW) (uW is microWatt)
-20 dBm = .01 mW (10 uW)
-30 dBm = .001 mW (1 uW)
-40 dBm = .0001 mW (100 nW) (nW is nanoWatt)
-43 dBm = .00005 mW (50 nW)

-43 is close enough. It'll be a bit more power than that, so somewhere between 50 and 100 nanowatts of power.

In terms of relative change if we see a value of -42 dBm that changes to -45 dBm, that is a 3 dB change, which means we just saw the power cut in half. That's the relative change.

That sounds drastic, but in wireless these kinds of fluctuations are common.

But what is -42 dBm in terms of power?

Hate math? Great news, I got your back. There's a trick! A decibel value shows a relative change. It's simply a comparison! For dBm, it's a comparison to 1 mW. With power, there is what is known as the 10's and 3's rule:

+10 dB = power x 10
-10 dB = power / 10
+3 dB = power x 2
-3 dB = power / 2

What does it mean? What's a 'good' value? We will tackle those one at a time. First, dBm refers to decibels relative to 1 mW (milliwatt) of power, or .001 Watts.

0 dBm = 1 mW

A negative number would reflect a power smaller than 1 mW. A positive number would reflect a power greater than 1 mW.

This is how you know we aren't surrounded by real tech people and hackers: no one in that field would ban 2600.

Zork is always crucial so if that's running it's looking great!

Also worth noting that very little of the Fentanyl going into the US comes over the Canadian border.

"But Canada isn't doing anything about Fentanyl?"

www.canada.ca/en/public-sa...

This was in response to Trump's demands and was well received when presented to Trump's incoming officials.

Even if you don't buy that, how does attacking your ally's economy help them strengthen the border?