Diagnosing Leaky Wave (Radiating Cable) Wireless Systems

Hello Everybody.

As a part of my job I try to diagnose various industrial wireless systems. 90 percent are leaky wave or so called radiating cable systems.

The systematic I have, is pretty much based on past experience and some free tools. Not so profi... Since I know or can understand the telegram traffic, I use Wireshark to check the repeated telegrams. Who is not hearing who on the net and then according to these ideas control cabling visually. Check overlapping APs in the infrastructure. And so on...

Some brand APs (for example Siemens Scalence) have some own diagnostic functions also. I benefit also from them. Logging signal level, roaming times gives an idea but I want to move to a more professional step and develop myself a bit in this area. Since the more I try to assist these systems, people (basicly my chefs) start calling me "expert" but I am not. I am actually S7 guy with programming experience but I have some basics of communication and wireless technology background generally and have hands on experience from former projects.

Before I am branded as "industrial wireless expert", I want to have a better understanding of what is going on up there. Any ideas, handbooks, books, tutorials?? How do profis handle industrial wireless? (leaky wave mainly) Any standart tools to measure signal level, SNR, roaming, VSWR, lost packet amount not brand specific??? Tools do not need to be free btw, I think an expert needs rather than free, the capable tools. And how to make actual systems better if it is possible?

Many thanks.

I have to deal with 900MHz and 2.4GHz wireless here in the US, the license-free bands and power levels < 1 watt. I'm not a radio guy and find that there are no readily promoted tools to check the radio end of things.

My ham friends have VSWR meters to check antennas and cabling, I seem to recall that the meters were also power meters. But there doesn't seem to be an instrument one for 1W or less license free bands.

Other than 'swap out with a known good extension cable or antenna or radio', I don't have a troubleshooting method. It's just systematic substitution. Not at all analytical ! !

The other problem seems to be undocumented protocols which they attribute to security, and undocumented error registers. Apparently the idea is that one just assigns and address and it works forever, without maintenance.

If you stumble onto any tools, I'd like to hear about it.

Dan