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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 where you want it — it's keeping signal away from where you don't. Get that reversed and you end up doing what Jim keeps finding in the field: back-to-back directionals on a pole, double the APs, double the channels, double the cost, for gain you're probably not even getting.

Then the practical half: how to tell a correctly-mounted AP from a botched one just by looking at a photo. Dome-down vs. the arrow in your design tool. The N-female ports with the weatherproof caps that tell you an AP is directional, not omni — two on a T350 SE, four on a T750 SE. Because no good design survives first contact with an installer, and the fix is catching it from the picture before they leave the site.

Plus a live walk-through of a predictive tool on a football field — what each pattern actually looks like, and a non-standard rotate-and-downtilt trick for tight warehouse-aisle cells.

Watch it on YouTube if you can — there's a lot to see.

Intro music by Alex Grohl, available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRWpx8VJ_E
and
https://pixabay.com/users/alexgrohl-25289918/