Just as an update - last night I changed the configuration on my router to specifically connect to Channel 1 instead of letting it choose a channel (the "Auto" setting I've always used). Near as I can tell, there has been no performance change (faster or slower) than what I had on Channel 6 (the Auto-selected channel), so there was nothing magic about channel 6.
The important part of this super-minor change is that my wifi has been rock solid for the past 24+ hours - not a definitive test of improvement but certainly an improvement over the past several days. So my problem MAY indeed have been a neighbour's wifi signal overwhelming my channel 6 communications and knocking out my RPi3-Weewx long enough to take me offline. I'll feel better about this as a solution if I can go 1) 3 days, then 2) a week without carrier loss. Unfortunately, I still won't know why my system suddenly became so sensitive, or what one of my neighbours did to make their router so anti-social ... Thanks, Vince for nudging me in that direction. It may not be the final fix, but its a step in the right direction. :) Something I learned that might help somebody else: earlier in this thread I mentioned I noticed a bunch of *blank-ESSID routers in my area which were also on channel 6, all with MACs starting with FA:8F:CA*. When I moved my router to channel 1 last night, I noticed that all of these ghost routers followed me. "Not very friendly", I thought to myself. But since my new configuration seemed to work, I didn't look into it further. This evening I saw these ghost routers were still squatting on channel 1 around me. Curiosity finally got the best of me, so I googled "wifi routers FA:8F:CA", and lo! I wasn't the only one who saw these things. One of the top links was a post saying that *Google's Home, Mini, and Chromecast (and maybe other products) set up Guest accounts by default* when installed in your home. These Guest accounts are fully open accounts (no password) but are supposed to only work with mobile devices on the same network and inside or nearby your home wifi router, so its not trivial to access them from the street - but still ... wide open? By Default? Anyway, I have a Google Home, three Mini's, and a pair of ChromeCast dongles powered up around the house ... and each was running a separate Guest account by default. Using the Google Home app on my iPhone, and entering the Settings for each device, I was able to simply turn Guest Mode off. And that is the end of the ghost routers. I don't know if they were responsible for my wifi problems, but its another variable in the mix that has now been removed. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
