Pi5 wifi unusable

[Steven Hirsch]

I realize this is not a forum for RPi issues, but since many of us are using the Pi 5 with their PiDP-10 I'm curious about experiences with poor wifi connectivity.  Mine is absolutely useless.  Following some comments about interference from nvme hats, I removed the Pimoroni and booted from SD card.  Didn't make any difference.  I'm unable to connect on either band despite being only 15 feet from the router.  None of my other Pi units (not 5s) have the slightest difficulty.  I've tried all the suggestions online, checked region settings, etc, etc.  Nothing makes a difference.

Am I alone in experiencing this?

[Whit Turner]

I've had no issues with the Pi 5 in my PiDP 10. Mine is about 25 feet from the router on a different house floor. The router is an Xfinity box which sits inside a wooden cabinet. Perhaps a defective PI?

Whit

[Steven Hirsch]

Are you saying that I shouldn't be seeing wpa_supplicant running?  It appears in 'ps' output in addition to NetworkManager.  In contrast to the article you linked, I am finding configuration files under /etc/wpa_supplicant.

[Mike Kostersitz]

Interesting, are you not running bookworm?

---

From: pid...@googlegroups.com <pid...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Steven Hirsch <snhi...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2024 8:56 AM
To: PiDP-10 <pid...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [pidp-10] Re: Pi5 wifi unusable

 

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[sunnyboy010101]

I posted my issues in the NVME thread, but thought I'd post my solution here as well.

Brief update first; I have two almost identical PI5 setups - one with a top m.2 board and a new one with a bottom m.2 board. The top m.2 has been working (with wifi) without issues 24/7 since mid-June. The new one would work but then wifi would just cut out after a couple of minutes. I found last evening that plugging in the network port worked as expected, but also made the wifi work. More curious, if I unplugged the wired lan, the wifi quit instantly. Plug it back in - wifi came up instantly.

I had read elsewhere that some people were having issues with NVME m.2 'hats' on some Pi5 setups giving the same wifi issues. As both m.2 hats were the same manufacturer and possibly the same chip, it seemed odd that one would have issues but not both.

So I re-checked all the parameters and found a problem: the new board's instruction pamplet said to add "dtparam=pcie1x" while the working pi5 had  "dtparam=pciex1". I checked on the official Raspberry Pi documents online, and the parameter was indeed pciex1. (love those bad pamplets). I changed the new board to the correct parameter, and added the "tdparam=pcie1x_gen=3" as well (recommended for this new board) and after rebooting - WIFI worked properly. As both boards were same manufacturer I added the gen=3 parameter to the first board as well.

As of 12 hours later, both boards are still running wifi without any issues.

[Dennis Boone]

> I realize this is not a forum for RPi issues, but since many of us
> are using the Pi 5 with their PiDP-10 I'm curious about experiences
> with poor wifi connectivity. Mine is absolutely useless. Following
> some comments about interference from nvme hats, I removed the
> Pimoroni and booted from SD card. Didn't make any difference. I'm
> unable to connect on either band despite being only 15 feet from the
> router. None of my other Pi units (not 5s) have the slightest
> difficulty. I've tried all the suggestions online, checked region
> settings, etc, etc. Nothing makes a difference.

On a Pi 5, the wifi antenna is a PCB gimmick arrangement. Find the
triangle next to the Pi bus header, the silver-topped wifi chip, and the
PCIe ribbon connector.

Various things could degrade signal strength or antenna pattern by being
in the near field: an active cooler, a hat mounted top or bottom, a PCIe
cable, etc. The wavelength of a 5.8 GHz wifi signal is around 2", for
2.4 it's about 5". The transition zone between near and far field seems
to be defined as about 1 wavelength out from the antenna.

My PiMoroni NVMe board's PCIe cable will definitely be in the pattern of
the antenna. By contrast, the official RPi one seems to keep its cable
in the center of the board, so might be better.

Positioning of the Pi relative to the access point could have a
significant impact even without coolers or hats. Try fiddling with
orientation. Also note that there are four microscopic surface mount
components in that triangle antenna area, two in mid-triangle, and two
right at the edge of the board. If one were to have rubbed them a bit
firmly in handling while mounting stuff to the Pi or the Pi to the real
machine (tm), and they were now missing, the antenna impedance match
would be way off, making it far less effective than even its normal
feebleness.

If you want an explanation of the antenna type used here (theory,
diagrams, Smith charts &c) see:

https://www.antenna-theory.com/design/raspberry-pi-antenna.php

The second image on that page has a blowup of the monoband antenna on a
Pi 3, where you can see the sort of components I mentioned above.

De

[Steven Hirsch]

On Tue, 16 Jul 2024, Mike Kostersitz wrote:

> Interesting, are you not running bookworm?

I'm running Debian 12.5, aka Bookworm. Am I not supposed to be seeing the
wpa_supplicant process?



>
> ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[Steven Hirsch]

Thanks for all the responses and advice, folks.  Unfortunately none of this worked for me.  To go point by point:

• To eliminate the nvme hat as a source of trouble, I removed it completely and ran from a freshly built (by Pi Imager) SD card.
• The little coupling capacitors are definitely in place and undisturbed.
• I tried switching to 5 GHz, but it wouldn't even connect on that band, much less pass packets.
• I tried moving the board around and raising it up in the air to avoid interference from other items on the table top.
• Double-checked all settings per RPi troubleshooting docs.

Nothing helped.  The unit connects immediately to the access point on the 2.4GHz band and receives an IP address from DHCP.  Even though nominally connected, it exhibits between 75 and 90% packet loss and is effectively unusable.

I contacted the Pi Shop for help and am working through their troubleshooting points - none of which have changed the behavior one iota. I'm hoping they will exchange it for a working board.

[Shawn Goodin]

Are the localization settings correct?  There's one there for WiFi (presumably slightly different band frequencies in different countries.

sudo raspi-config  may have a setting for that.

Shawn Goodin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-10/a074e1ad-2510-4f47-b4d3-76666bc9aac5n%40googlegroups.com.

[Steven Hirsch]

On Wed, 17 Jul 2024, Shawn Goodin wrote:

> Are the localization settings correct? There's one there for WiFi
> (presumably slightly different band frequencies in different countries.

Yes, that's part of the RPi connectivity checklist.

>
> sudo raspi-config may have a setting for that.
>
> Shawn Goodin
>
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 1:12 PM Steven Hirsch <snhi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for all the responses and advice, folks. Unfortunately none of
>> this worked for me. To go point by point:
>>

>> - To eliminate the nvme hat as a source of trouble, I removed it

>> completely and ran from a freshly built (by Pi Imager) SD card.

>> - The little coupling capacitors are definitely in place and
>> undisturbed.
>> - I tried switching to 5 GHz, but it wouldn't even connect on that

>> band, much less pass packets.

>> - I tried moving the board around and raising it up in the air to

>> avoid interference from other items on the table top.

>> - Double-checked all settings per RPi troubleshooting docs.

[sunnyboy010101]

Well, interestingly I'm back where I was before - this pi5 loses it's wifi almost instantly unless a network cable is plugged into the RJ45 jack. Unplug - lose wifi (instantly); plug back in - wifi back.

I'm sure it has to do with this particular back mount NVME card but I don't care anymore. It works.

I did a fair bit of troubleshooting; built new SD card from scratch and copied to NVME (no difference). Even copied working system NVME to SD card, then over to new pi5, copied and cloned to NVME, such that the systems were virtually identical. Exact same behavior. I therefore conclude it's the NVME (m.2) card, but as I'm not changing it I will live with a wired PiDP10.