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Forum Discussion
HOW TO DISABLE 5G TEMPORARILY ON ORBI ROUTER
HELLO,
I own an Orbi system and recently obtained a Personal Weather station that does direct uploads to various weather sites online. The weather station will only connect to Wi-Fi via a 2.4GHZ system based on the following statement in the manual:
The weather station only supports the 2.4 GHz band. Please make sure both mobile device and weather station console are both connected to the same 2.4 GHz band. If you own a dual band router, you may be required to temporarily disable the 5 GHz band, connect your mobile device to the 2.4 GHz band, and after programming the console, reconnect to the 5 GHz band
My question is I have logged into the Orbi and seen the wireless setup which shows both bands as well as the same on the guest network. I have selected all the disabled blocks on the advanced settings on the 5 GHZ to no avail. Is there a way to temporarily disable the 5 ghz long enough to me to make the connection of my weather station and then re-enable it since I use it with so many devices. Thanks in advance...
128 Replies
There seem to be a number of people having the same sort of issue lately. I believe the older firmware let you power off the radios, but the recent firmware does not. You can manually disable a specific interface on the command line, but there is an autmated watchdog process that will bring it back up again, usually within seconds.
I did work out a hacky way of temporarily downing the 5 GHz interface that might work for you:
- Shut off your satellites (otherwise, you need to repeat the following steps on all of them, in addition to router)
- Enable telnet on the router (from the /debug.htm page of the web interface)
- telnet to router
- After loggin in, run the following comand script on the command line (yes, 1 big line):
seconds=60; x=0; while [ $x -lt $seconds ]; do ip link set down dev $(config get wl5g_NORMAL_AP); x=$(( x + 1 )); echo "down $x"; sleep 1; done
This command will determine the interface for the primary 5 GHz, and shut it down for 60 seconds. If you want to change the amount of time that the interface stays down, simply change the "seconds=60" part of the script to whatever you want.
This doesn't make any permanent config changes, so if worse comes to worse, simply reboot the router and you should be right back to where you were.
Good luck!
!00% on the money!
After enabling Telnet - I used Putty to connect and just pasted the string below. I did increase it to 300 seconds (5 mins) just to make sure I was able to do everything on the setup La Crosse App (like scan the barcodes for the station and sensor).
Everything else is perfect. I willl be sending this to the La Crosse support since I have been working with them to resolve this issue.
guzzijason Thank you for finding this solution!
Im having the same issues with probably the exact same weather station. Can you provide either links or slightly more detailed info as it relates to the telnet into orbi router. I think i enabled telnet on my orbi router, but cant seem to figure out how to command line in from mac and run that script.
Any detailed help would be greatly appreciated as i get zero help from the weather station support.
Hi, can i use this method to disable the 5hz band permanently?
I missed this question before, but no - it is not practical to try and use this as a permanent solution. There is some sort of watchdog process on the Orbi which is constantly checking the status of the interfaces, and bringing them back online if they happen to be shut down. This workaround fights against that watchdog, but you really wouldn't want to do that long-term.
ChihSiang wrote:
Hi, can i use this method to disable the 5hz band permanently?
I tried it twice but it gave me a syntax error, not sure why. unexpected "done"
You're missing the closing paren after "wl5g_NORMAL_AP", before the semicolon.
I got by this by setting my phone hotspot with same credentials as my wifi. Of coarse had ro turn off both orbi's first. Once i configured the station, i turned off the hot spot and powered on the orbi's
I am getting an error from the script when I run it on my CRB40 with firmware level V2.1.4.6_1.0.8: /bin/ash: config: not found
Any suggestions on how to resolve this issue?
Something else you might try that the worked for me. I understand that the Orbi firmware at one point did have the option to turn OFF the 5G signal. Last time I checked, it is now where you can only turn it down/reduce.
What I did was turn the 5G down as low as it will go (if you can) then unplug one or both of your SATs. This will cause your WIFI to be sourced only from the router. Take the weather station/display into another room with your Iphone and try to set it up.
Good luck!
I'm not seeing where, specifically, the power can be turned down on the 5GHz radio. I've checked both the iOS app and the orbilogin.net web interfaces, and am not seeing it.
Can you provide more detail on how to turn the 5GHz radio down?
Go to the advanced tab on the web settings for your router and on the left you will see towards the bottom a line that reads advanced setup. Click on the + singn and then on the wireless settings. From there all should be self explanatory. When you are done configuring your 2.4 device come back and renable all the way it was before.
You are now back where you started.
Hope this helps.
I also had issues connecting a 2.4Ghz device to my Orbi network. Since I can no longer easily turn off the 5Ghz radio, I Instead temporarily gave the 5Ghz radio a different ssid than the 2.4Ghz radio. This way I was able to connect my 2.4Ghz only device with no issues. After setup of that device, I restored the ssid on the 5Ghz radio and everything seems to work just fine. I used the Netgear genie app to do this, you can also log in t the Orbi's IP address.
We have an ORBI RBK50. We had 3 Amazon Echos and a variety of smart switches hooked up and working fine. At some poin there was a software upgrade with the Orbi and suddenly none of the 2.4ghz devices will show up. People in this forum keep reminding users with th is question that the system is automatic and will switch to 2.4ghz automatically, which is great - except you need to connect to the Orbi first and none of the 2.4ghz devices we have that use Smart Life work. This includes 6 smart switches from 3 different manufacturers - including Amazon.
This thread starts with suggestions on how to hack the Orbi to temporarily turn off the 5ghz radio so the other devices can connect but we are hoping a more resonable solution to the problem has been developed by the fine technical support staff at Netgear. We cant be the only users having an issue like this.
Keyword 2.4ghz
Turn off 5ghz
smartplug support
