Replies: 15 comments
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Hi @chconnor
That adapter seems to consistently get good reviews. Panda has a history of making pretty good adapters and this one seems to be a good one. It is based on the mt7610u chipset. That chipset and its driver are very stable. I have the Alfa ACHM that is based on the same chipset.
I would expect this to be the case.
Tell me how you are measuring the speed. Is this an internet speed or a LAN speed?
Is it likely that your speed can be improved? Probably so. The answer is probably not with the adapter or driver as the in-kernel drivers are like having an automatic transmission in your car. The driver almost always automatically configures things and gets it right. What we may need to look at is the wifi router/AP. My ACHM can sustain 190-200 mb/s and I'll bet your Panda can as well.
That is very good. Your signal strength and quality are not an issue. In fact you can move further away from the AP and be fine. Let's look at some of the details:
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Thanks for the generous help! - For that simple test I did an scp of a large file (cat /dev/random > file) and checked speeds with dstat. It was LAN, and it was from the Pi to my desktop, over the Archer AX50. The router/AP is in 'router mode', with the 2.4 and 5GHz channels presented as a single SSID ("Smart Connect"). Internet service is nominally >1Gbps. Desktop gets actual ~800Mbps down, 70 up. Cloudflare speed test on the phone only shows 30-50 Mbps, which surprised me as I've gotten much faster in the past, but the past tests were over explicit 5GHz and not "Smart Connect", and the phone is now connecting on 2.4GHz for whatever reason. Re: congestion, the 2.4GHz band is pretty crowded, but I'm not sure if it's a problem? Using PingTools on my phone, the WiFi Scanner shows that the Pi is on channel 2 at -35. There are a couple other SSIDs on 1 at like -85, an ESP32 project of mine nearby on channel 4 at -26, another SSID of mine in a nearby building at -84 on channel 3. The 5GHz bands look much more open -- just my router SSID on channel 155 at -40 and occasionally seeing a neighbor on the same channel at like -85. Other bands in WiFi Scanner look open.
Phone -> desktop gets ~3MB/s. Desktop -> phone gets about 2MB/s. That's over 2.4GHz, but still seems really slow. When I turn off the conflicting ESP32 project I get phone -> desktop 2.5-3 MB/s, and desktop->phone 3-4MB/s, so that's a little faster. Here's the wavemon "Info" section for the Pi/Panda (current link quality 100%, signal -24):
Anything else to check or test? Thanks again. |
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Argh, sorry, forgot there was an app running on the Pi that I needed to kill first. New test: With ESP32 alive: With ESP32 dead: I'm just running these test for like 15 seconds and eyeballing the average, so there's a large margin for error. So I assume the above two tests are basically the same result. |
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Does the router allow you to turn off Smart Coneect? If so, I would recommend doing so as we need to know what we are connected to. If you can turn it off and need to rename one of the networks, renaming the 5 GHz band is usually the better idea.
As long as you can turn Smart Connect off, I think connecting to 5 GHz to see what we see would be a good idea. Does the router support DFS channels? The regular and DFS channel will depend on what country you are in. Do you know what 5 GHz channels are supported in your country? |
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Thanks! Ok, Smart Connect is now off. I'm in the USA. DFS is apparently supported, IIUC, by the router. I set channel width to 160MHz, but the Pi is having trouble connecting... I pull the SD card and look at syslog and see:
Attached are router options as they stand. I'll try again with "auto" channel width and see what happens. [er, standby, trying to attach...] My understanding is that I need to wait 10m after DFS is enabled before testing, so I'll do that as well (if the Pi is even able to connect.) |
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Ah, stand by, have to set localization on Pi before it will use 5GHz... Edit: ...hmmm, still no luck... going down a rabbit hole on the "deauthenticating from 40:3f:8c:72:d3:96 by local choice (Reason: 3=DEAUTH_LEAVING)" ... lots of various bug reports and fixes out there... will update when I figure out what's up... |
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The adapter is capable of 80 MHz channel width.
The standard is 60 seconds. The bottom line is that once you bring the router up, if you are using a DFS channel, you can't connect for around 60 seconds until it has made sure the channels are clear. For DFS, I would start with channel 100. You don't have to use DFS, you can use channel 36 or 149 to see what happens. You could turn OFDMA off unless you have something that uses WiFi 6. Are you rebooting the router after you make changes? |
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Mmmok... set the locale to US, set the WLAN country to US, set the AP channel width to 80MHz, turned off OFDMA, rebooted the router, and now the Pi connects at 5GHz! Thanks for that. WiFi Scanner in PingTools shows my SSID at channel 153 [edit "149 and 155" now] at -43 dBm and a few others at -85 and lower. Results: Pi -> Desktop: 1.7MB/s ...i.e. roughly the same for the Pi, unfortunately. Some info from the Pi in case it's useful:
iwconfig:
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Just to make sure I understand. You have a little Pi with your adapter in a usb port and you are connecting to your WiFi router? Right? Can I get you to try some speed tests at the following site: (if you have a browser on the Pi) I am concerned because your speed should be higher and it is not obvious to me why. You can probably turn OFDMA back on as it should not be a problem. I was just trying things. WiFi can be complicated. |
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Thanks! That's correct, Pi Zero (not Zero W or Zero 2W) with the Panda dongle (on a short USB-A-to-micro extension). Desktop is ethernet into the Archer AX50, Pi and Phone connect over wifi, and data passes between them. It's a headless install, I'm afraid, so no browser. If I do a wget of a file from my own website, I see ~2MB/s to the Pi. If I do it from my desktop for the same URL, I see 35MB/s. testmy.net from my desktop shows 300-400 down, 30-40 up. I opened a thread on the RPi forums to see if anyone has any ideas there and will report anything interesting here. And I note that my previous dongle (similar form factor to the Panda, with a RTL8188CUS chipset) was only getting like 300-400 KB/s on the same Pi, so maybe there really is something wrong in my config (though I haven't messed with it -- pretty vanilla headless install, with a static IP configured via dhcpcd.conf and wpa_supplicant set up...) |
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D'oh -- forum advises that the Pi Zero is just wimpy. And now that I look at the dstat results I see something I should have seen before:
...i.e. "idl" is 0 the entire time, i.e. it's just CPU limited. RAM (512MB) is also down to like 69MB so it couldn't even buffer much if wanted to. It never occurred to me that this could be the issue, so I didn't even consider the possibility. Sorry for the time wasting! Unless you have other ideas, I'm going to assume that's the limit of this device [edit: meaning, the limit of the Pi]. I'm trying to think if I have other devices I could test this with, to be of some use to your list. I have an old HP laptop on linux that I could possibly try it with, but it's probably an old kernel... |
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CPU limited. I understand. I have a Pi3B and Pi4B but no experience with an older Pi Zero. What kernel is in the laptop? uname -r The driver for your Panda has been in the kernel since kernel 4.19. Or you could install a new distro. What you could help with is doing a review based on your experience. A review that I could post with the listing in the Plug and Play list. Amazon has several reviews and I know several people that have this Panda stop by at times but nobody has written a review. No hurry. When you have time, a review would be welcome. |
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Ok -- I'll aim to try it on the laptop and write something up; that ancient laptop isn't much faster than the Pi Zero but it should at least be able to saturate a dongle. :-) Thanks again for all the help. |
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You are welcome. If you have modern systems you want to test, this Panda should be Plug and Play on Windows 10 and 11 also. I'm not saying to write the review on Windows as this is a Linux site but I thought you might find the info helpful. |
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Hi -- re: your list here...I just got a Panda PAU0B and connected it to my Raspberry Pi Zero. (Not Zero 2, just the old Zero.)
Seems to work without issue. Speed aren't great -- about 1.1 - 1.7 MB/s. That could be user error -- I'm not experienced in wifi dongle configuration. It is much faster than the RTL8188CUS-based "EB-LINK" dongle I was using, which maxed out at 200-300KB/s. (If there are any configuration things I could do to speed it up, let me know!)
Raspbian / Buster 10
Kernel: Linux pv4 5.10.103+ #1529 Tue Mar 8 12:19:18 GMT 2022 armv6l GNU/Linux
Edit: wavemon shows 100% link quality, -30 dBm, at like 12 feet / 4m from an Archer AX50.
If there is anything you'd like me to test with it or to report about it, let me know.
Thanks for the great list!
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