Tips for troubleshooting wifi drops

I was hoping someone could give me tips on troubleshooting an issue I am having with WiFi at a school I provide IT support to.

The reported problem is that every now and again devices drop from the wifi (which is a Ubiquiti UAP-AC-HD). Is anyone aware of any low cost wireless scanning tools that I can use?

My hope is to set up a laptop to graph wireless signal strength and noise to see if there is something drastically increasing interference or something like that which causes the drop.

I am just not familiar with any tools to do this.

Load a laptop with linux and set it to ping the device while connected to WiFi and log to see if it drops. Easy enough to setup something such as https://www.phpservermonitor.org/ on it.

Is the AP connected to a unifi controller? First step for me would be to check that and see if the controller is reporting any problems.

It is connected to a controller, but no problems reported.

So you can be fairly sure it’s not the AP dropping off the network then.

Do you know if all of the devices drop or just some or just one? That might also help.

Schools are a strange environment. 30 laptops all turning on and logging on at the same time is quite a bit of load all at once and is normally at the start of a lesson that is already not really long enough. Then the little darlings flick the wifi switch off or something similar… I don’t miss those days!

As Tom said, your best plan is probably a laptop or something like a Pi with linux on it then maybe something like*;

watch -n 1 cat /proc/net/wireless > ~/wireless.log

(totally untested, probably could be grepped to clean it up and probably needs further refinement)

It is an access point in the office area. All devices in the office get dropped. I wondered if it was something to the affect of some staff using the microwaves at that moment therefore causing too much interference.
I will set up some devices for testing. Both a server monitoring the AP and a client via ICMP as well as trying out the command you suggested on the client.

It’s tricky, because supporting them isn’t my day job, so I can’t be there when the issue is happening. I can only go in evening and weekends.

Do you have another AP you could swap in, that might be another good trouble shooter.

my money is on the microwave that may or may not exist or someone rolling a metal trolley around the office.