MacOS – How to disable automatic scanning for WiFi networks

macbook promacoswifi

The objective is to strengthen the WiFi reception (at the moment without additional hardware).

I live in an area with a 100+ radio signals.
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Majority is useless (to low signal) but still scanned and displayed. The one I get connection is so low it keeps lossing it if I sneeze.

Also I observed that my WiFi keeps scanning (looking for a Network) even tho I am connected.

Can I disable the continuos looking for a network? hoping to gain some signal strength on the one I am connected.

Additional information:
I have a MacBook Air with OSX 10.8.3, so no plugs for external antena that I know off. I live in Spain, and the routers are not meine nor accessible to me. Getting my private internet (ISP) is not a option.

Best Answer

AFAIK there is no way to disable wireless network scanning. You can only disable the alerts about new wifi networks being found.

More significantly, because of the way wi-fi works, the transmission rate is going to be very very low due to all the stations interfering with each other.

But reading into your question at a deeper level, "How can I get decent wifi"

Google "pringle can antenna" You will find a raft of recipes for high gain directional wifi antennas. This can be used to select a given station out of the crowd.
This, by itself leaves you leashed to an ethernet cable to the external antenna, which you really don't want to move.
So you connect the pringles cantenna to your own wifi router, set it to broadcast on a seperate channel (ideally >3 channels away from the one the cantenna is listening to)

Finally, you may find that the easier way to get anything done is to use a wired conection.

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MacBook – How to disable automatic wifi connection

The only way to stop from automatically joining a preferred, or known, wi-fi network, is to not store the password for that network and type it in each time without clicking the "save password" button.

As soon as you save the password the network will be added to the preferred list even if the remember networks button isn't selected, and it will connect to it automatically (or rather it will connect to the first one on the list that is finds in the order in which you have them listed).

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The beacon loss event is the key. Your wireless card lost contact with the router and gave up.

wl0: Beacon Loss Event

If you can, change your beaconing rate on the router to be faster (and slower - sometimes the opposite of the intuitive thing is the answer). Also you should run the Wi-Fi Diagnostics tool which resides in /System/Library/CoreServices and monitor the performance of your setup. This will let you see the signal and noise so you can pick a channel on the router that loses the beacon the least often. There is a lot of data here, but the most important number is the txRate. It is how well your radio can talk to the router radio. All other measures end up reflected here. If you have bad signal, or bad noise, this goes down. The higher you can get the transmit speed, the less likely you will lose the beacon.

It could be just that the Mac hardware doesn't like the beacon pattern of that router and in the end you pick up an Apple router (or another one) - but you should be able to try some more things and perhaps make this better.

Ignore the sandboxing errors - sandboxing would prevent all operation, all the time and not lead to an intermittent failure.

Best Answer

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