Mains Wireless Interconnected Smoke Alarms.

A spectrum analyser (or its poorer relative the scanning receiver with some sort of level indications )is a jolly useful tool for those of us who work in the comms world on a regular basis.

However, I'd caution that in unskilled hands it is possible to cause as much confusion as it solves. There is something of an art in estimating  how many microvolts  to expect at the terminals of different sorts of antennas when oriented in a particular way, and it is easy to fool yourself into thinking something is either very small or very significant when it isn't.

It would be worth looking at a known working system  to calibrate expectations before trying to debug a faulty one.

But there are now some very cheap if basic devices that bring simple spectrum analysis into the reach of the occasional  user, (as apposed to the £10k lab instruments that were once the only option) but even they need a lot of practice to get the best out of them (and some surprisingly cheap antenna analysers that are really a cut down network analyser too)

Mike.

A spectrum analyser (or its poorer relative the scanning receiver with some sort of level indications )is a jolly useful tool for those of us who work in the comms world on a regular basis.

However, I'd caution that in unskilled hands it is possible to cause as much confusion as it solves. There is something of an art in estimating  how many microvolts  to expect at the terminals of different sorts of antennas when oriented in a particular way, and it is easy to fool yourself into thinking something is either very small or very significant when it isn't.

It would be worth looking at a known working system  to calibrate expectations before trying to debug a faulty one.

But there are now some very cheap if basic devices that bring simple spectrum analysis into the reach of the occasional  user, (as apposed to the £10k lab instruments that were once the only option) but even they need a lot of practice to get the best out of them (and some surprisingly cheap antenna analysers that are really a cut down network analyser too)

Mike.