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Forum Discussion
Orbi and La Crosse weather station
I just switched to an Orbi system and cannot get my La Crosse weather station to connect to the wifi on my app. It says it needs to connect to the 2.4 Ghz... my phone is connected to the 5 Ghz band...
tried everything and as much as i did like the ORBI ... not being able to connect to 5 devices because of the bandwidth issue... had to return it.
I've seen multiple people post on here that their mobile device *must* be on 2.4 GHz to setup these weather stations, because the weather stations only support 2.4 GHz.
First off, this makes abosultely no sense from a technical perspective.
Second, it's directly refuted by La Crosse's own docutmentation:
https://www.lacrossetechnology.com/router_info
From the La Crosse documentation:
- If both of your 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi bands have the same name (SSID) and password, you should not have any problem connecting your weather station regardless of which Wi-Fi network band your smartphone is connected to. If you fall in this category and your station is connected, you will not need to read further. NOTE: Most Mesh Networks (e.g. Google Wifi, Netgear Orbi, Linksys Velop) will likely work in this way. But when first trying to connect your weather station, you'll want to be near and connected to your mesh's central hub for optimal performance.
- That's what it says, but not what it does unfortunately. Bought it because i read this, but it does not connect. Looking at an accurite system that connects directly to router since i have heard nothing from LC.
I can't for the life of me understand why it would matter, but there are a few tricks you can try to force your device(s) to 2.4 GHz.
- 2.4 GHz has a longer effective range than 5 GHz, so simply moving to the edge of your coverage and restarting the WiFi on your mobile device may force it to 2.4 GHz.
- You can go into the Orbi advanced admin interface and lower the transmit power of the 5 GHz radio to 25%. This will further limit its range, improving the odds that devices will connect to 2.4 GHz instead.
- As a last resort, I posted a tip on how to actually (temporarily) disable the 5 GHz radio on the Orbi via the telnet interface:
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/HOW-TO-DISABLE-5G-TEMPORARILY-ON-ORBI-ROUTER/m-p/1469365#M19226
The Orbi used to have an option to disable the radios right in the user interface. I have no idea why they removed it. Hopefully, you'll be able to find a solution one way or another. Good luck!