AP-on-a-Stick Surveys, Part 2: Four Tips for a Cleaner, More Accurate Result
Part one covered the basics: the kit, scaling the drawing, and keeping a consistent walking pattern. Those fundamentals get you a survey that’s technically sound. What follows here is less about the mechanics and more about judgement, the kind of detail that only shows up once you’ve run a few of these and started noticing where the small stuff quietly costs you accuracy.
Doors matter more than you’d think
If a survey point sits inside a meeting room or a closed office, I’ll shut the door on my way in. A building rarely operates with every internal door propped open, so surveying it that way gives you a coverage picture nobody will ever actually experience. Closing it as you go keeps the attenuation honest.
Name your access point before you start
Before you begin surveying, give the access point’s SSID a name you’ll recognise instantly, something like Survey-APoS. In a lot of buildings you’ll be surveying alongside dozens of other networks, and trying to pick your own signal out of that list mid-survey wastes time you don’t need to lose. Name it properly up front and you can filter the survey app down to just that SSID, so you’re only ever looking at your own AP and nothing else.
Keep the map clean as you go
The other habit I’d recommend is keeping as few survey paths visible on screen as possible while you’re working. Once you’ve surveyed a few access points, a floor plan can quickly fill up with overlapping lines, and it gets hard to tell what you’ve already covered from what you haven’t. Ekahau lets you remove paths you don’t need to see. Hamina takes a slightly different approach and dims anything that isn’t the active path. Either way, the effect is the same: you can focus on the walk you’re doing right now instead of untangling everything that came before it.
Learn how to fix your own mistakes
We’re all human, and mistakes happen more often when you’re still learning to survey. It’s easy to come out of a room and drift off in the wrong direction without noticing. What matters is knowing how to move or delete a survey point when that happens. Both platforms let you do it, and getting comfortable with that early means a moment of inattention doesn’t quietly sit in your data and skew the result later.
That’s it for this one
Those four habits, closing doors, naming your AP properly, keeping the map readable, and knowing how to correct mistakes, are what separate a survey that just gets finished from one you can actually stand behind. Next time I’ll be doing a side by side comparison of Ekahau and Hamina and giving you my honest opinion on both. See you there.
