forum.pistar.uk

Have since last 2 weeks 2 hotspots setup. Working ok, setup for DMR only.

But.

I notice that both hotspots are losing their wifi at a point in time.
They are not active at the same time. One of them is powered and have of course differnent ip's n.n.n.80 and n.n.n.81.

Have both hotspots receive static IP from DHCP server from the router. Works ok initial connection.

But at a point in time the hotspot loses connection. Checked at of the lease time left from the 24 hours and this is 7+ hours so the router thinks the hotspot still has the lease.

It shows the IP in the OLED or for the other on the Nextion.
SSH/HTTP connection fail.
Activating the hotspot via radio seems to work but of course no actual activity as the network connection has gone.

How to resolve this? How to find the reason why this happens and why the hotspot is not automatically reconnecting to the defined wifi ssid.

Thanks for helping.

A commonly reported case for Raspberry-Pi's to lose connection is that they have a power-save mode active on the WiFi system. I don't recall if Pi-Star software disables that -- I know it hasn't affected my unit.

power management seems to be off based on iwconfig command.

Found reference to :

wpa-roam vs wpa-conf.

It seems reading the documentation that wpa-conf will never reconnect. Wheras wpa-roam will.

Can this be implemented in the pi-star setup ???

I have previously found that a basic three hotspot wpa_supplicant.conf file suffices to enable me to take a portable hotspot between home, car and office without rebooting (run on battery) without issue.

However, I currently have the problem that the hotspots are dropping off the network and not reconnecting after a couple of hours. They are idle at the time of drop-off.

I also noticed that the hotspots do not like my TP-Link Deco mesh wifi either - refusing to connect to our usual SSID which is “First Second” but they will connect to the same SSID on the Fritzbox router (with a space also).

I am troubled by the latest version of raspberry pi OS which does away with the fully working WPA Supplicant and replaces it with net manager, a wholly dysfunctional and poorly documented subsystem in my view. I notice that coincident with this change, the latest pi-star update has resulted in the wpa_supplicant.conf files replacing the plain text SSID, password etc lines with hashed SSID, password etc, tying the unit to a particular AP as far as I can see.

I have not got much time to spend on this at the moment but I understand the frustration of something that used to work now breaking with, it seems, no fault.

Ian