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802.11ac: A Survival Guide

Matthew S. Gast
802.11ac: A Survival Guide
by Matthew S. Gast
Copyright © 2013 Matthew S. Gast. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are
also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/
institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or [email protected].
Editors: Mike Loukides and Meghan Blanchette Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery
Production Editor: Kristen Borg Interior Designer: David Futato
Proofreader: Rachel Head Illustrators: Robert Romano and Rebecca Demarest

August 2013: First Edition

Revision History for the First Edition:

2013-07-22: First release

See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781449343149 for release details.

Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly
Media, Inc. 802.11ac: A Survival Guide, the image of a common European eel, and related trade dress are
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While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no
responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained
herein.

ISBN: 978-1-449-34314-9
[LSI]
 For L.,
who reminds me it’s okay to have my head in the clouds sometimes.

And for the NCSA instruction team who made me into a pilot so I can get there:
Mike, Terence, Larry, Mike, John, Buzz, and John.
 Table of Contents

Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

1. Introduction to 802.11ac. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
History 1
The Core Technology of 802.11ac 4
Beamforming and Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) 6
Operating Frequency Band for 802.11ac 8
802.11ac Product Development Plans 9

2. The PHY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Extended MIMO Operations 11
Radio Channels in 802.11ac 12
Radio Channel Layout 12
Available Channel Map 15
Transmission: Modulation, Coding, and Guard Interval 17
Modulation and Coding Set (MCS) 17
Guard Interval 20
Error-Correcting Codes 21
PHY-Level Framing 21
The VHT Signal Fields 23
The Data Field 28
The Transmission and Reception Process 29
802.11ac Data Rates 32
802.11ac Data Rate Matrix 32
Comparison of 802.11ac Data Rates to Other 802.11 PHYs 35
Mandatory PHY Features 36

3. The MAC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

v
 Framing 37
Frame Size and Aggregation 38
Management Frames 40
Medium Access Procedures 44
Clear-Channel Assessment (CCA) 45
Protection and Coexistence of 802.11ac with Older 802.11 Devices 48
Dynamic Bandwidth Operation (RTS/CTS) 50
Security 54
Mandatory MAC Features 56

4. Beamforming in 802.11ac. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Beamforming Basics 60
Null Data Packet (NDP) Beamforming in 802.11ac 65
Single-User (SU) Beamforming 69
Channel Calibration for Single-User Beamforming 70
Multi-User (MU) Beamforming 74
Channel Calibration for Multi-User Beamforming 74
Multi-User MIMO Transmission 78
MU-MIMO Implementation 82

5. 802.11ac Planning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Getting Ready for 802.11ac 88
Catching the 802.11ac Technology Wave 89
Client Device Mix 91
Application Planning 93
Physical Network Connections 95
Security 98
Additional Planning Considerations 100
802.11ac Radio Planning 101
Available Radio Channels 101
Coverage and Capacity Estimates 101
Equipment Selection 106
Network Architecture for 802.11ac 109
Hardware Considerations 114
Building an 802.11ac Network 118
Channel Selection 118
Network Tuning and Optimization 120
Checklist 123

Glossary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

vi | Table of Contents
 Foreword

Today, it’s easy to take Wi-Fi and its magical benefits for granted. Wi-Fi is a fundamental
part of our Internet ecosystem—it’s hard to imagine a world without it. In fact, the world
without Wi-Fi wouldn’t be the world we have; we’d be missing out on vast elements of
the Internet’s potential.
But the invention of Wi-Fi wasn’t inevitable. The technological innovation we call Wi-Fi
required a major innovation in U.S. government spectrum policy.
Wi-Fi is a use of spectrum on an unlicensed basis, and the Federal Communications
Commission (the U.S. government agency created more than 75 years ago to manage
communications, including those using electromagnetic spectrum) didn’t allow that
type of use until 1985. Spectrum frequencies were assigned only on an exclusive li‐
censed basis. These exclusive licenses—granted to launch radio, TV, satellite, and back‐
haul transmissions—helped create tremendous economic and social value, so maybe it
wasn’t a surprise that the FCC hadn’t authorized spectrum bands for unlicensed use.
But then, along came an idea: there were some bands of spectrum that were lying largely
fallow—at 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 5.8 GHz. Nobody could figure out what they could
be licensed for. The bands were surrounded by other commercial uses, and transmis‐
sions at high or even moderate power levels or distances would cause interference. These
became known as the “garbage” or “junk bands,” and they sat there.
That is, until a brilliant policy innovator named Michael Marcus, an FCC staff engineer,
suggested that this spectrum be made available for use without a license and on a shared
basis, as long as the transmissions were at low power levels and they didn’t interfere with
neighboring licensed uses.
The bet was that innovators would figure out how to weave value out of that spectrum.
Although it wasn’t framed this way at the time, the idea was simple, forward-looking,
and in retrospect, obviously consistent with the great arc of American invention: provide
a platform for innovation, and innovators will come.

vii
So on May 9, 1985, the FCC adopted a little-noticed Order on “spread spectrum tech‐
nology” that opened up the junk bands. And innovators got to work.
Before long, someone had invented garage-door openers using unlicensed spectrum;
then wireless microphones, cordless phones, Bluetooth, and eventually Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi has had staggering success: from a standing start, it’s now been adopted in roughly
200 million households worldwide. There are more than 750,000 Wi-Fi hot spots glob‐
ally, and over 800 million Wi-Fi-enabled devices are sold every year. And all of these
metrics are growing.
Devices and services built on unlicensed spectrum are an essential part of the U.S.
economy: studies estimate that unlicensed spectrum generates as much as $37 billion
annually for the U.S. economy. Wi-Fi hot spots in the United States increase the value
of licensed broadband service by an estimated $25 billion a year.
And the benefits have dovetailed into other key sectors: 80% of wireless healthcare
innovations, for example, are now on done on unlicensed spectrum, according to one
report. Unlicensed spectrum is transforming our homes, with amazing products already
in the market offering entirely new and exciting ways to enjoy music and video, and
other products to drive energy efficiency. Wi-Fi is a key basis of machine-to-machine
communications—or the Internet of Things—a swiftly emerging market with potential
to transform any number of sectors; we’ve had a 300% increase in connected M2M
devices using unlicensed spectrum in the past five years, and that’s just the beginning.
In other words, unlicensed spectrum is a boon for the American economy, and it con‐
tinues today to provide start-ups and innovators access to a test bed for spectrum that
is used by millions, helping bring new technologies to consumers in a rapid fashion.
Wi-Fi hasn’t been the only major spectrum policy innovation in the last three decades.
The FCC pioneered spectrum auctions for the world in the 1990s—an alternative to the
less-efficient, case-by-case administration of licenses through lotteries and comparative
hearings—and has since conducted over 80 auctions, granting more than 30,000 licen‐
ses. These auctions have generated over $50 billion for the U.S. Treasury and, even more
important, over $500 billion in value for the U.S. economy, according to expert
economists.
The FCC also, quite consequentially, began to grant spectrum licenses for flexible use,
rather than strictly circumscribing use to particular purposes. Flexible spectrum rights
help ensure spectrum moves to uses valued most highly by markets and consumers,
and the FCC has been hard at work the past few years to maximize flexibility and remove
outdated use rules and restrictions.

viii | Foreword
Together, licensed and unlicensed spectrum have given us the amazing mobile Internet
ecosystem we enjoy today—smartphones, tablets, the new “apps economy,” and more.
And the mobile revolution is driving economic growth, job creation, and U.S. compet‐
iveness. Nearly $250 billion in private capital has been invested in U.S. wired and wireless
broadband networks since 2009; there’s been more private investment in ICT than any
other U.S. sector, including by major oil and gas or auto companies. The U.S. is the first
country deploying 4G LTE networks at scale, and in late 2012 we had as many LTE
subscribers as the rest of the world combined, making us the global test bed for next
generation 4G apps and services.
The new mobile apps economy—a made-in-the-U.S.A. phenomenon—has already cre‐
ated more than 500,000 U.S. jobs, and more than 90% of smartphones sold globally in
2012 run operating systems developed by U.S. companies, up from 25% three years ago.
Annual investment in U.S. wireless networks grew more than 40% between 2009 and
2012, while investment in European wireless networks was flat, and wireless investment
in Asia—including China—was up only 4%.
But we know we face big challenges to our mobile momentum. None is greater than the
spectrum crunch.
Spectrum is a limited resource. Yet smartphones and tablets are being adopted faster
than any communications or computing device in history; U.S. mobile data traffic grew
almost 300% last year, and is projected to grow an additional 16-fold by 2016. Wi-Fi
and other unlicensed innovations are key to bridging this supply/demand gap. Wi-Fi
already carries more Internet traffic than cellular networks, and commercial mobile
carriers are offloading 33% of all traffic to Wi-Fi, with that amount projected to grow
to 46% by 2017.
So with the U.S. mobile ecosystem booming and demand for spectrum skyrocketing,
policymakers need to free up a large amount of new spectrum for both licensed and
unlicensed use.
Fortunately, the FCC has been focused on this task. Early in the Obama administration,
the FCC released the country’s first National Broadband Plan, which included a goal of
freeing up 300 MHz of spectrum (including both licensed and unlicensed) by 2015 and
500 MHz by 2020, essentially doubling the amount of airwaves available for broadband
by decade’s end. We will achieve the 2015 goal, and with continued focus and leadership,
we can achieve the 2020 goal as well.
In 2010, the FCC freed up the largest amount of low-band spectrum for unlicensed use
in 25 years by making high-quality “white spaces” spectrum available in between TV
channels. And in early 2013, the FCC passed a plan to increase unlicensed spectrum for
Wi-Fi by about 35%—unleashing 195 MHz in the 5 GHz band.
But we need more—more spectrum and more policy innovation.

Foreword | ix
Incentive auctions are one such major next-generation spectrum policy innovation.
Proposed in 2010 as part of the National Broadband Plan, incentive auctions are two-
sided and use the power of the market to repurpose beachfront spectrum used by TV
broadcasters (in the 600 MHz band) for both licensed and unlicensed wireless broad‐
band. In 2012, Congress passed and President Obama signed landmark legislation au‐
thorizing the auctions; the FCC is on track to hold the world’s first incentive auction in
2014.
In addition to freeing up a large amount of spectrum for licensed use, incentive auctions
have the potential to unleash a next-generation of unlicensed spectrum. So, as part of
the auction, the FCC proposed setting aside a significant amount of the returned broad‐
cast spectrum for unlicensed use. To my surprise, this has been met with some oppo‐
sition. Some say 100% of the recovered spectrum should be auctioned for exclusive
licensed use. This would be a mistake, as it shuts down a potential new opportunity for
innovation. And as Matthew Gast and others have demonstrated, if we build new plat‐
forms for innovation, the innovators will come.
Meanwhile, innovators continue to make tremendous strides around existing unli‐
censed spectrum, particularly Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is making more efficient use of spectrum,
with incredible boosts in speed, capacity, and reliability. I’m confident the new 802.11ac
standard for Gigabit Wi-Fi—and Matthew Gast’s important guide—will demonstrate
anew the powerful value of the unlicensed platform.
For years, Matthew Gast has worked tirelessly to unleash the opportunities of Wi-Fi.
This book is another significant contribution to the future of Wi-Fi and the mobile
Internet. And it comes at just the right time.
—Julius Genachowski
Julius Genachowski served as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commis‐
sion from June 2009 to May 2013.

x | Foreword
 Preface

People keep moving. Networks still don’t, but they are being forced—sometimes quite
painfully!—to accommodate the motion of users.
Wireless LANs are well established as The Way to Connect to the Network. When I first
moved to Silicon Valley in the late 1990s, it was common to hear people talk about how
they had run Ethernet through their homes so that every room had a network jack.
Friends of mine worked with their home builders to install their own wiring, and oc‐
casionally a renovated home’s listing would breathlessly tout network connectivity. (To
those who knew the technology, networking was always more than a patch panel in‐
stalled someplace convenient.)
Today, network wiring no longer has a monopoly on that initial connection to the net‐
work edge. From Ethernet, the world has shifted to using wireless LANs, almost exclu‐
sively based on the 802.11 family of standards. In the space of a decade, Ethernet has
been transformed from the underlying technology that made jokes like “will code for
Internet access” possible into a mere support system for the wireless network that ev‐
erybody attaches to.
The road to becoming the “first hop” technology in the network has required several
steps. When 802.11 was first standardized in 1997, many of the networks ran at just one
megabit, with a really fast network (for that point in time) running at double that speed.
At that time, there was a huge debate between the proponents of frequency hopping
technology and direct sequence technology. Direct sequence won out and led to the first
mainstream technology, 802.11b. The wireless network community would move from
a single radio carrier to multi-carrier technology with 802.11a and 802.11g, and on to
multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) with 802.11n.

xi
The next big milestone for 802.11 is a speed that is, as Dogbert would say, “big and
round”1—a gigabit per second of raw speed. That project is currently in development
as 802.11ac. If you wished 802.11n were faster, buckle up and start reading!

Audience
This book is about 802.11ac, the draft standard “gigabit WiFi” specification. After the
massive revision that was 802.11n, the technology changes in 802.11ac are (fortunately)
not quite as large. To get the most out of this book, you’ll need to be familiar with the
basics of the 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, and have some familiarity
with how pre-802.11ac networks were designed and built.

Think of this book as the 802.11ac-specific companion to the

earlier 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide from 2005,
and 802.11n: A Survival Guide, published in 2012.

The intended reader is a network professional who needs to get in-depth information
about the technical aspects of 802.11ac network operations, deployment, and monitor‐
ing. Readers in positions such as the following will benefit the most from this book:

• Network architects responsible for the design of the wireless networks at their places
of business, whether the 802.11ac network is the first wireless LAN or an upgrade
from a previous 802.11 standard
• Network administrators responsible for building or maintaining an 802.11ac net‐
work, especially those who want to make the transition from earlier 802.11a/b/g or
802.11n technologies

If you have picked up this book looking for information on security in 802.11ac, it’s in
here. Fortunately, 802.11ac is just as secure as previous generations of 802.11. Security
is part of the protocol, so if you are comfortable with 802.11 security in 802.11n or
earlier, you know everything you need to know about 802.11ac.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

1. As always, Dogbert was ahead of the curve. He was frightening people way back in 1994.

xii | Preface
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Acknowledgments
This is my second book written with Meg Blanchette as editor. Meg kept the book
moving along as best she could, which is no small feat given that I successfully pursued
a pilot cetificate as I wrote this book. Meg regularly sought out opportunities for me to
experiment as an author, most notably by encouraging me to participate in the early
release program starting six months before the book’s final release. All the delays in
publication are due entirely to my preoccupation with aviation, and would no doubt
have been much worse without Meg’s diligent efforts to keep me on track.
I could not have asked for better readers to keep me motivated. As a direct result of all
the notes and questions that I received, the book grew substantially during the review
cycle. The review team included several 802.11 luminaries who are famous in their own
right. My all-star review team consisted of (in alphabetical order, so I do not need to try
and rank their many valuable and varied contributions in any sort of order):
Joe Fraher
Joe is a technical writer and colleague of mine at Aerohive, where he consistently
produces documentation that is lucid, complete, and easy to use. Unlike me, he has
mastered all the tools of his trade and handles the whole project from start to finish.
One of Joe’s main contributions to the finished product you now hold is that he
does not let me get away with glossing over anything. If you find that the book is
consistent and complete, your thanks are properly given to Joe.
Changming Liu
Changming is the CTO at Aerohive, and a fountain of ideas both for Aerohive’s
customers, and for me personally. I cannot name a conversation with him that I did
not wish were longer.
Chris Lyttle
Chris heads up the wireless LAN practice at a major integrator, where he helps
customers figure out how to use the technology that we build as an industry. Along
the way, he chronicles the journey on his blog at Wi-Fi Kiwi, sharing valuable bits
of information with anybody who is trying to run a wireless LAN.

xiv | Preface
Craig Mathias
At the Farpoint Group, Craig has been a prolific writer on 802.11 for many years.
I am indebted to him for his many kind words over the years, and the encourage‐
ment he has always given me to continue writing on 802.11. Craig has asked me to
be on many panels at industry events over the years, and has never failed to promote
my books in his thoughtful introductions. As an analyst on the cutting edge, Craig
is able to talk about new developments throughout the development process.
Matthew Norwood
Matthew, a senior technologist at an integrator, is one of the many people in the
industry who has to do useful things with the crazy collection of technology parts
we create. His networking mad science, which is about many components in ad‐
dition to wireless LANs, unfolds at In Search of Tech.2 Matthew brought the sen‐
sibility of an expert network engineer to the book, and his review of the planning
and integration parts of this book was particularly valuable.
Adrian Stephens
Adrian is one of the leaders of the 802.11 working group, where he has consistently
used computers to save work instead of creating more of it. Talking to Adrian is
like dropping questions into a deep well of technical knowledge. (For the record, I
have yet to find the bottom.) I benefited from Adrian’s prodigious knowledge when
we worked together on the 802.11-2012 revision, and he continues to serve the
802.11 community in ways too numerous to count. His comments on advanced
MAC features and beamforming particularly strengthened the text, and his
humourous3 comments added levity to the long slog of finishing the book, the effect
of which was to help me see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Tim Zimmerman
Tim is an analyst with a technology advisory firm, and one of the most plugged-in
people in the Wi-Fi industry. I am grateful for his time, and his many comments
expanded multiple parts of the book in ways that will benefit you.

2. Matthew also wrote the nicest thing I’ve ever read about my writing on his own blog at http://www.insearch
oftech.com/2013/04/11/the-curse-of-matthews-books/.
3. Adrian is English, so I deviate from the American spelling just to show him that I can be bilingual.

Preface | xv
In addition to the formal review team, I benefited from the assistance of many other
readers. Early release readers came from all across the world. Some of the most helpful
were:
Jeff Haydel
Jeff is a talented field engineer for Aerohive, and was all that an author could ask
for in an early release reader. He religiously read multiple drafts of the book, and
was particularly helpful in striking the right balance between remaining faithful to
the specification while trying to be concise and comprehensible.
Colleen Szymanik
Colleen Szymanik runs one of the largest and most complex wireless networks in
the world, and her comments kept me focused on how to keep the book focused
on information that would help working network administrators everywhere.
Ben Wilson
My colleague Ben Wilson has helped deploy more wireless networks than I care to
count. His work takes him all across the UK, and I cannot figure out how he found
time to review the book, let alone offer numerous useful suggestions.
One of the advantages of publishing the book early was that readers were able to interact
with each other, both in person and on blogs. As I was working on incorporating tech‐
nical review comments, I finally met Lee Badman face-to-face at Interop, and our brief
discussion was critical to refining my thinking about the connectivity that will support
future generations of 802.11ac access points.
I am grateful to readers who served as valuable sanity checks during the writing process,
and helped keep me as focused as possible on the end goal. Terry Simons, who works
on wireless LAN integration for Nest Labs, found the time to review the draft of this
book and give me the detailed technical feedback of somebody who knows what it takes
to make Wi-Fi just work. Tom Hollingsworth offered encouragement at a critical junc‐
ture. Michele Chubirka, the security podcaster for Packet Pushers, provided a much-
welcomed reality check during the middle of the long twilight of the book. Kelly Davis-
Felner and Bill Solominsky at the Wi-Fi Alliance offered encouragement both in person
at the Wi-Fi Alliance meeting where much of this book was written, and by drafting me
into writing for the Wi-Fi Alliance on 802.11ac.

xvi | Preface
 CHAPTER 1
Introduction to 802.11ac

If the network drops below a speed of five hundred

megabits per second, the users will explode!
—The plot of the movie Speed (starring Keanu
Reeves as a network administrator)
One of the many experiences I value from my time participating in the 802.11 working
group is the ability to compare the “outside” view of a technology with the “inside” view
of people in the engine room sweating to make it work. From the outside, wireless LANs
have seen a steady progression in speeds from a megabit in the late 1990s to a gigabit
with the first release of 802.11ac in 2013. Getting inside the process of making that
happen let me see the false starts and wrong turns, and generally appreciate—and con‐
tribute to!—the behind-the-scenes work that creates that smooth external perception.
One important note about this book is that it is being written at the same time as the
standard is being developed. It is possible that changes to 802.11ac will occur during
the technical review process for the draft standard, though based on historical experi‐
ence, I would expect any changes to be small at this point.

History
The 802.11 working group has a structured method of introducing new technologies.
When a gap is identified in the existing standard, a sufficient number of participants
can start a study group to investigate whether there is sufficient justification to develop
new technology. Typically, as the Last Big Thing is wrapping up, the project to develop
the Next Big Thing will begin. The structured method of developing new standards has
led to a long history of innovation, delivering both new physical layers and enhance‐
ments to the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer in terms of security and quality of
service, as shown in Figure 1-1.

1
Figure 1-1. 802.11 timeline

In 2007, the 802.11n project was well underway, with a draft standard that was techni‐
cally complete enough to enable multi-vendor interoperability. In May of that year, the
802.11 working group started the Very High Throughput (VHT) study group to launch
a project to create even faster networking. The VHT study group was chartered to
develop speeds in excess of 802.11n’s 600 Mbps, and the genesis of 802.11ac dates to the
start of that study effort.
Once started, a study group works to propose to the IEEE as a whole to take on the
project in a document known as the Project Authorization Request (PAR). Part of the
PAR is to demonstrate that five key criteria are met, and if the criteria are not met, the
project does not move forward. They are:

• Broad market potential

• Compatibility
• Distinct identity
• Technical feasibility
• Economic feasibility

The VHT study group began its work at the May 2007 meeting, and it recommended
forming two gigabit networking task groups. The distinction between the two task
groups is the supported frequency band they operate in. Task Group AC was authorized
to build a gigabit standard that was supported at frequencies of less than 6 GHz, which
makes it compatible with the existing frequency bands used by 802.11. (Early in the
development process, it was decided to restrict 802.11ac to the 5 GHz frequency bands
used by 802.11n and 802.11a, and not to support the 2.4 GHz frequency band used by
802.11b and 802.11g.) Task Group AD was authorized to build a gigabit standard in a
frequency band around 60 GHz. While it is interesting technology, it requires significant

2 | Chapter 1: Introduction to 802.11ac

changes to the way that networks are planned and built, and the range is dramatically
shorter with such a high frequency.
Once Task Group AC was authorized in September 2008, it began working on technical
approaches to meet the goals laid out in its PAR.1 The group was chartered in its PAR
to produce a standard operating at 1 Gbps for multiple stations, and 500 Mbps for a
single station which hints at some of the technical approaches that will be used to get
to much higher speeds. Before starting work on writing the detailed technical specifi‐
cation, the task group approved a specification framework document. Beginning with
a specification framework represented a departure from the 802.11 working group’s
typical practice of beginning with detailed technical proposals. By starting with a list of
attributes for the final standard, Task Group AC was able to shorten the standards
development process and move the technology to market more quickly.2 Even though
the 802.11ac PAR set out the goal of gigabit networking, that relatively modest goal will
be met with first-generation products, and the full standard provides additional op‐
portunities for significant additional speed gains.

802.11ac and 802.11ad: What Difference a Frequency Makes

Both the 802.11ac and 802.11ad efforts sprang out of the VHT study group. The stand‐
ards effort for 802.11ad completed in late December 2012, shortly after this book went
into early release. Although the standards effort for 802.11ac is ongoing, pre-release
hardware for 802.11ac has been in development for a longer period of time and com‐
mercial products based on the draft standard are readily available. The major difference
between the two that drives most comparisons is the operating frequency. 802.11ac was
founded as gigabit at less than 6 GHz, which, practically speaking, keeps it constrained
to the existing unlicensed frequency bands used by 802.11. 802.11ad started off in rec‐
ognition of new spectrum available at 60 GHz in the US, Europe, and Japan. 802.11ad
uses a very wide (4 GHz) channel and tops out with a conservative modulation (16-
QAM) because the range of such high frequencies is typically short. With an intended
short range, the 802.11ad specification changes the way that some fundamental opera‐
tions of 802.11 occur so that it is more of a peer-to-peer protocol. Key applications
for 802.11ad are the support of wireless docking and high-speed short-range cable
replacement.

1. The final approved 802.11ac PAR is available at https://mentor.ieee.org/802.11/dcn/08/11-08-0807-04-0vht-

below-6-ghz-par-nescom-form-plus-5cs.doc.
2. The specification framework document is 11-09/0992, which was at revision 21 as of this book’s writing. The
most recent version of the specification framework can be downloaded from https://mentor.ieee.org/802.11/
documents?is_dcn=992&is_group=00ac&is_year=2009.

History | 3
The Core Technology of 802.11ac
At first glance, 802.11ac appears to be an exercise intended to make Claude Shannon
nervous by packing more bits into each slice of spectrum and time.3 Conceptually,
802.11ac is an evolution from 802.11n and not a revolutionary departure. Many of the
techniques used to increase speed in 802.11ac are familiar after the introduction of
MIMO. Unlike 802.11n, which developed major new MAC features to improve effi‐
ciency, 802.11ac uses familiar techniques and takes them to a new level, with one ex‐
ception. Rather than using MIMO only to increase the number of data streams sent to
a single client, 802.11ac is pioneering a multi-user form of MIMO that enables an access
point (AP) to send to multiple clients at the same time. Table 1-1 lays out the differences.
Table 1-1. Differences between 802.11n and 802.11ac
802.11n 802.11ac
Supports 20 and 40 MHz channels Adds 80 and 160 MHz channels
Supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands Supports 5 GHz only
Supports BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM, and 64-QAM Adds 256-QAM
Supports many types of explicit beamforming Supports only null data packet (NDP) explicit beamforming
Supports up to four spatial streams Supports up to eight spatial streams (AP); client devices up to
four spatial streams
Supports single-user transmission only Adds multi-user transmission
Includes significant MAC enhancements (A-MSDU, A-MPDU) Supports similar MAC enhancements, with extensions to
accommodate high data rates

They include:
Wider channels
802.11ac introduces two new channel sizes: 80 MHz and 160 MHz. Just as with
802.11n, wider channels increase speed. In some areas, 160 MHz of contiguous
spectrum will be hard to find, so 802.11ac introduces two forms of 160 MHz chan‐
nels: a single 160 MHz block, and an “80+80 MHz” channel that combines two 80
MHz channels and gives the same capability.
256-QAM
Like previous 802.11 amendments, 802.11ac transmits a series of symbols, each of
which represents a bit pattern. Prior to 802.11ac, wireless LAN devices transmitted
six bits in a symbol period. By using a more complex modulation that supports

3. In 1948, Shannon, then a Bell Labs researcher, developed the mathematical techniques to prove the maximum
data speed that can be transmitted through a channel. The resulting “speed limit” of the channel is often called
the Shannon limit or the Shannon capacity, and is related to both the signal-to-noise ratio of the channel and
the channel’s bandwidth. This is just one of his many important contributions that led to his title as “The
Father of Information Theory.”

4 | Chapter 1: Introduction to 802.11ac

 more data bits, it is possible to send eight bits per symbol period, a gain of 30%.
Details of QAM will be presented in Chapter 2. The extent to which 256-QAM can
be used reliably in real-world deployments is an open question for 802.11ac at this
time.
Beamforming
802.11ac radically simplifies the beamforming specifications to one preferred tech‐
nical method. Beamforming in 802.11n required two devices to implement mutu‐
ally agreeable beamforming functions from the available menu of options. Very few
vendors implemented the same options, and as a result, there was almost no cross-
vendor beamforming compatibility. With the key features of 802.11ac depending
on beamforming, however, a simplification was required to enable the core
technology.
More spatial streams and multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO)
802.11ac specifies up to eight spatial streams, compared to 802.11n’s four spatial
streams, at the AP. The extra spatial streams can be used to transmit to multiple
clients at the same time. With the ability to transmit at high speeds to multiple
clients simultaneously, 802.11ac will speed up networks even more than might be
apparent from simply looking at the data rate.

The Many Faces of Beamforming

Beamforming is a process by which the sender of a transmission can preferentially direct
its energy toward a receiver to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, and hence the speed
of the transmission. Broadly speaking, it can be grouped into two main types. Explicit
beamforming is based on the transmitter and receiver exchanging information about
the characteristics of the radio channel to wring out maximum performance based on
measurements, while implicit beamforming is based on inferences of channel charac‐
teristics when frames are lost. Explicit beamforming is generally more powerful because
the channel measurements are more detailed than the inference of loss, but the explicit
measurement and exchange of data on the radio link must be supported by both ends
of the link. Transmitting beamformed frames typically requires an antenna array capable
of altering its pattern on a frame-by-frame basis, which is why the term “smart antenna”
is often used in discussions of beamforming. To change the radiation pattern on a frame-
by-frame basis, smart antennas are controlled electronically.

The Core Technology of 802.11ac | 5

Beamforming and Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO)
Multi-user MIMO represents the greatest potential of 802.11ac, though it has yet to be
proven in commercially available products in widespread use. Prior to 802.11ac, all
802.11 standards were single-user: every transmission sent was sent to a single destina‐
tion only. Beamforming is occasionally used in such networks as a means of increasing
the signal power over a portion of the AP’s territory to increase the data rate at the
receiver. Multi-user transmissions are a new capability within 802.11. Radio waves, like
any waves, add by superposition. If there are two receivers located in sufficiently dif‐
ferent directions, a beamformed transmission may be sent to each of them at the same
time.
Figure 1-2 compares the single-user MIMO technologies used in 802.11n with the new
multi-user MIMO in 802.11ac. In Figure 1-2(a), all of the spatial streams are directed
to one receiving device. In 2013, multiple spatial streams were a commonplace technical
innovation, supported in every 802.11n AP and almost every client device. In contrast,
Figure 1-2(b) shows what it means for a MIMO transmitter to be multi-user. In the
figure, the access point is transmitting four simultaneous spatial streams. The magic of
MU-MIMO is that the four spatial streams are being transmitted to three separate de‐
vices. Two of the spatial streams are transmitted to a laptop supporting high-speed data
transmission. Each of the other two spatial streams is transmitted to a single-stream
device, such as a phone or tablet computer. To keep the three transmissions separate,
the AP uses beamforming to focus each of the transmissions toward its respective re‐
ceiver. For this type of scenario to work, it is necessary that the receivers are located in
different enough directions that focused transmissions avoid interfering with each oth‐
er. Due to the potential of inter-stream interference, multi-user transmissions require
more up-to-date feedback, a challenge that will be discussed more in Chapter 4.
Multi-user MIMO has the potential to change the way Wi-Fi networks are built because
it enables better spatial reuse. One of the keys to building an 802.11 network of any type
is reusing the same channel in multiple places. For example, in Figure 1-3(a), the radio
channel is used for omnidirectional transmissions. When the AP transmits, the radio
energy is received by both the laptop and the smartphone, and the channel may be used
to communicate with only one of the devices at any point in time. One of the reasons
why high-density networks are built on small coverage areas is that the same radio
channel can be reused multiple times, and each AP in a dense network can transmit on
the channel independently. Multi-user MIMO builds on the small-cell approach by
enabling even more tightly packed networks. In Figure 1-3(b), MU-MIMO is in use. As
a result, the AP can send independent transmissions within its own coverage area. Just
as Ethernet switches reduced the collision domain from a whole broadcast segment to
a single port, MU-MIMO reduces the spatial contention of a transmission and enables
the first “switching-like” applications of Wi-Fi.

6 | Chapter 1: Introduction to 802.11ac

Figure 1-2. Single- and multi-user MIMO comparison

Figure 1-3. Improved spatial reuse with MU-MIMO

The Core Technology of 802.11ac | 7

Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 CHAPTER IV—CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS

What did I do when I got back, did you say? Well, after the sinking of
the Andalusian my folks thought I ought to be willing to give up the
sea and confine my adventures to Montclair, the Lackawanna
Railroad and New York, and they urged me to settle down and sell
engines, or get into some other kind of business in the big town and
commute like the rest of the suburbanites.
I tried it for a few months but the air is dead on land and it stifles
me like poison-gas when I breathe it, and besides, I kept hearing the
call of the sea oftener and oftener and louder and louder just as
though a spook mermaid were holding a conch shell to my ear.
Well, sir, there were just no two ways about it. I was not cut out for
a salesman but I could handle a key with the best of them. So one
bright day—it was the first of March—when dad told me to go out
and see a prospect who wanted a 40 horsepower crude oil engine, I
made one stone kill two sparrows and after fencing with the would-
be buyer for half an hour I slipped over to the Lord’s Court Building
where the Marconi Company had their offices and talked with my
friend Sammis, the Chief Engineer.
“No, there isn’t anything you’d want just now,” he reflected.
“There’s a couple of new ships building in Belfast for the Cunard Line
and one of them will be launched in a couple of months. I might be
able to get a berth for you on her.”
“I want to go right now if I go at all,” I told him, for the land ached
in my bones like the old Harry and I knew the only way I could get
relief was to go to sea.
“How would you like to go on a seal catching expedition to the
Arctic? It ought to be a pretty good health trip for an overworked
salesman. The Polar Bear and Midnight Sun sail in a couple of
weeks from St. Johns, Newfoundland, to be gone for a month or so
and the pay is double that of any operator in the transatlantic
service. I have just shipped an operator named Mackey up there and
gave him the post on the Midnight Sun so you’ll have company, for
they will sail together. If you’ll take it I’ll try to get you a good berth in
the meantime.”
“To the Arctic,” I ejaculated. “Well, Sammis, this is a voyage I’ll
have to sleep over, but it sounds good to me. I’ll let you know in the
morning.”
There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind but that I’d take it but I
didn’t know exactly what my folks would say about it, for their idea
was that they had had enough of my going to sea and they further
thought that I ought now to be perfectly satisfied to stay on land for
the rest of my natural life.
Do you know that when I stepped out of the Lord’s Court Building
after having signed up the next day I could feel the stone sidewalk
rolling under me like the deck of a ship and that the putrid air of Wall
Street smelled as if it had a dash of sea salt in it. That’s how great I
felt. Dad would have to get some one else to sell his engines—it was
the Arctic for me!
 WE WERE CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS!

On arriving at St. Johns I at once hunted up Captain James of the

Polar Bear and handed him my commission. And such a captain he
was! He looked a different race of seafaring men from the captains I
had seen in the regular Atlantic service.
His grizzled hair and beard and clear, keen eyes were gray; that
part of his face which showed was about two shades lighter than the
color of dried walrus meat and with his silence—except when any of
the crew failed in his duties—you would have known, even if you’d
met him on Broadway, that his home was somewhere inside the
Arctic Circle. He turned me over to his first mate who also looked as
if he had a heart of oak and would be equal to any duty he might be
called on to perform if it was north of latitude 75 degrees, the latitude
at St. Johns.
And, oh, the crew! They were cutters of the old school, every one
of them. I had no idea that sailors of their kind were to be found
anywhere at this time here on earth except in song and story, but
there they actually were all about me in the living flesh. There was
an air about them that told as plainly as spoken words they had
weathered many a polar storm and that now, even at St. Johns, they
were way too far south of the bleak, frozen regions to be in their
element.
And say, the ship! She was a beaut of the old wooden kind, not a
whole lot to look at, but built to stand the strains of furious gales as
well as the tremendous pressures of the ice packs. Indeed, she had
been one of Commander Peary’s ships which had been farthest
north when that explorer sought to find the North Pole some years
before.
The wireless apparatus and I were the only objects on the ship
that seemed not to belong to her, but when we reached the sealing
grounds we found ourselves and helped in the catch, thereby making
friends with the Captain and his crew.
The transmitter was formed of a single ten inch induction coil
which was energized by a current of the ship’s dynamo. The receiver
was of the regular Marconi type with a magnetic detector. The masts
of the Polar Bear were only fifty feet apart and an aerial made up of
half-a-dozen wires swung between them.
Whoever installed the equipment stopped at the aerial for there
was no ground. It was no small job to get a decent ground for the
ship, as I have said before, was an old-timer and had a wooden hull.
Now where a ship has a steel hull all you’ve got to do to make a
ground is to simply connect the ground wire to a water pipe, or any
other metal part of the ship, for these lead to the steel hull; as the
hull sets in the water the very best kind of a ground is had without
any trouble to get it. But what’s to be done when there’s nothing but
an old-fashioned wooden hull between your instruments and the
water? The way I did it was to run a wire from the instruments down
to the engine room; then the assistant engineer fixed a 6 x 6 x 24
inch block of wood parallel with and close to the propeller shaft; this
done we screwed a copper brush, that is a strip of stiff sheet copper,
to the block so that it pressed flat on and hard against the shaft.
Under the head of one of the screws I looped the free end of my
ground wire and screwed it down tight. This made a good enough
ground connection through the shaft and the propeller keyed to it
which was submerged in the water. With this transmitter, aerial and
ground, I could cover 100 miles or so when the conditions were
favorable.
Everything was hustle and bustle on board and all around us, for
at that time of the year—it was nearing the middle of March—a score
or more of ships steam from St. Johns along the great Labrador
Coast to the frozen north where the young harp seals are found by
the thousands on the ice floes off the coast.
Of all the ships at St. Johns I saw only one other that was fitted
with an aerial and when I got my apparatus in order I made my way
over to her to see Mackey, her operator.
In days gone by the sealing ships were all schooners and just as
these gave way to wooden steamers so the latter will be supplanted
by ships with steel hulls, and the Midnight Sun was the first of these
fine new steel craft. For size and power she put it all over the Polar
Bear, but she lacked the glamor of romance and for this reason I
liked my ship the best.
I had met Mackey, her operator, at Liverpool once and we
straightway became better acquainted. He told me that the firm who
owned the Polar Bear also owned the Midnight Sun and that the
Captains of them were to work together. A new experiment was to be
tried, he said, and that was to catch seals by wireless, but what the
modus operandi of the scheme was he hadn’t the faintest idea and
no more had I. I remember when I was a little boy that folks talked
about running street cars by electricity and I wondered how it could
be done. I had a kind of a vague notion that a chunk of electricity
came along, struck the car and pushed it ahead just as a breeze fills
the sails of a ship and carries her for’ard.
In after years I learned that the current of electricity flowed along a
wire parallel with the tracks and that it passed from this feeder to the
trolley of a car, thence down a conductor to a motor which it
energized and finally back to the power house through the rails;
further that it was the power of the motor thus developed which
drove the wheels of the car; and I was disappointed, for it seemed to
me to be altogether too round-about a way—too far-fetched—to
justify the statement that the “car runs by electricity.”
The same thing holds good when you see signs which read, “hats
cleaned by electricity,” “eggs hatched by electricity,” and “diamonds
made by electricity,” for the hat is merely rotated by an electric
motor, the eggs are hatched in an incubator which is heated by a
current flowing through a wire, and the diamonds are made in an
electric furnace.
Now catching seals by wireless was to my mind quite a vague,
mysterious and altogether a difficult proposition to see into—even as
running a car by electricity was when I was a little shaver. Seals are
wonderful creatures, as you will admit if you ever saw them do a
balancing act in a show, and I have heard that they have a great
liking for music. A seal hunter can take a phonograph, put a band
record on it, set it up where there is a patch of seals and start it
going. The seals will come out of the water to listen to the sweet
strains and every time one puts its nose above the surface the
hunter, who is lying a little way off, will shoot it with his rifle. This then
is what you might call hunting seals with music.
It looked to me as if we might be told to send out a line of wireless
waves to a patch of seals, bend up the ends of a few dashes and
when the seals had swallowed them the sailors would heave ho and
pull them aboard. But no, catching seals by wireless was not done in
quite so direct a fashion, as you will presently see.
We only made one stop after we left St. Johns and that was at
Cartwright, near the mouth of the Hamilton River, on the bleak coast
of Labrador. And wireless, let me say right here, has been a big
factor in changing life, such as it is, in this wild, forbidding country.
Labrador, you know, is a narrow strip of coastland along the edge
of the province of Quebec. It is from 10 to 50 miles wide, but a
thousand miles long, reaching from Belle Isle Strait which separates
the lower end of it from Newfoundland to Hudson Strait which lies
within the Arctic Circle.
The inhabitants live only on the coast and these are made up
chiefly of Eskimos in the north and Indians in the south, and all along
and in between are trappers, fishermen and live yeres. The trappers
push into the interior a little way to run their lines of traps and in the
spring of the year thousands of fishermen come up from
Newfoundland to take the cod-fish, which abound off the coast at this
season of the year. If you ask one of the poor, ignorant white
inhabitants about himself he will say that he lives yere, hence the
nick-name of this fixed part of the population. The condition of all
these poor, simple folk has been much improved by wireless.
For many years the mail-boat was the only steamer that made
calls at all the ports along the coast and she did this about every six
months. If any one wanted to get something from St. Johns he had
to know it a long way ahead of time and even when he was
thoughtful enough to order it the chances are that by the time it
reached him he had forgotten he had ordered it or had gotten over
wanting it.
On the mail-boat there was a doctor and the inhabitants had to
wait to get sick until he came, or perhaps, it would be stating the
case a little more accurately to say that however ill they might be
they had to wait until he came before they could be treated. Anything
might and often did happen to his patients between calls. But all this
has been changed by wireless which now links up the towns along
the coast with Battle Harbor where the Royal Deep Sea Mission has
its hospital for fishermen, and not only may supplies be ordered but,
what is of far greater importance, the sick may have their diseases
diagnosed and medicine prescribed though they are as far away as
Maine, by the doctor in charge and all in the twinkling of an electric
wave.
 As we steamed up the coast the ice fields began to loom up and
as far as the eye could reach they glittered and sparkled like gigantic
jewels under the glare of the Arctic sun. When night came on and
the stars came out they shone a hundred fold brighter than in the
temperate zone and the pale blue moon illuminated the scene with a
kind of a supernatural light that seemed not to belong to earth.
But all the days and nights were by no means fine ones, for
howling gales and fierce snow storms continually sprang up and I
often wondered how a ship built and sailed by the hands of men,
could weather them out. It was a man’s work! On such occasions I
stuck to my wireless room which I found mighty comfortable and
trusted to the Captain and his mates to see the ship safely through.
As we got farther and farther north the Aurora borealis, or
northern lights as it is called, grew brighter and brighter every night
until the whole heavens in the region of the North Pole were
scintillating with streamers that spread out like a great fan, reaching
over our heads and far to the south. The first mate said that it was as
brilliant an aurora as he had ever seen and his explanation of it was
that the spots on the sun had been unusually large and numerous.
Not only did the sun’s activity show itself in the aurora, but it set
up a violent magnetic storm on earth and this made the compass
needles oscillate to and fro as much as 1½ degrees on each side of
their normal positions. Now magnetic storms always interfere very
seriously with the operation of both overland telegraph lines and
cable systems where the circuit is completed through the earth.
I had heard some one say, or had read somewhere, that a
magnetic storm would interfere in the same way with wireless
messages and I was fearful for some time that it would put our
signals out of commission. But all through the magnetic storm
Mackey and I sent our messages without the slightest trouble—
indeed if we had not been told that a magnetic storm was on we
should never have guessed it. Evidently wireless had scored another
point over the wire systems and another pet theory was put on the
ice to cool.
We sailed up the coast keeping pretty close to it while the
Midnight Sun steamed up and out from it until we were fifty or more
miles apart. Now here is where wireless came in, in catching seals.
Over the constantly broadening gap between our ships Mackey and I
kept their Captains right in touch with each other.
The Captain of his ship wirelessed that there were any number of
old seals about him and this showed, the first mate told me, that
there were patches of white coats, as the young harp-seals are
called, somewhere in the neighborhood.
Our ship immediately headed in his direction and a night’s
steaming brought us within a few miles of the Midnight Sun, but we
did not see any white coats either. But after we scouted around for
five or six hours we sighted a patch of hundreds upon hundreds of
little seal babies basking on the ice floes in the sun. My Captain
ordered me to signal the good news of our find to the Captain of the
Midnight Sun; he in turn steamed at once for our ship and when she
came up the killing began.
These seals are called harp-seals because they have brownish
yellow bodies and on the back of each one is a big black mark like a
harp. The old harp-seals start from way up north of Melville Sound in
the early part of the winter and by March they are off the Labrador
coast. There tens of thousands of them herd together on the drifting
ice when the little white-coats, as the baby seals are called because
their fur is so white, are born and, curiously enough, nearly all of
them are born on the same day.
It was a great sight to see these fat roly-poly baby seals lying on
their backs on the drifting ice and using their flippers to fan
themselves with to keep cool.
A few days later the ships were so close to each other that
Mackey and I visited back and forth across the ice while the crews
were busy taking the seals. When we headed for St. Johns we had
on board our ship more than twenty-five thousand sealskins, which
was as big a load as we could carry, while the Midnight Sun had
nearly fifty thousand and together we broke all previous records.
This being the case these hardened Arctic Captains were as
tickled as a couple of sea-urchins and both agreed that wireless was
the greatest sealing scheme introduced since steamers took the
place of schooners.
 Before we bore up for St. Johns there were great doings on board
both ships. Rockets were fired in lieu of regular fireworks and
Mackey, having the most powerful set, sent a message to old Boreas
and old Arcticus who are pioneers in the refrigerating business, and
if the North Pole has an aerial suspended from it and the latter has a
receiver attached to it, I doubt not but that they listened-in to the first
wireless signals ever sent within the polar circle; if so, they heard
some mighty fine things said about themselves and the glorious,
though, withal frigid, country they rule over.
I wouldn’t have missed that experience for a million dollars—
what’s that?—well, not for a hundred dollars in real money anyway.
 CHAPTER V—MY ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS

When Bert Mackey and I got back to New York we were both in the
same boat—to wit, we were without jobs. On the way down, though,
Bert unfolded a very alluring scheme by which we could, he allowed,
make oodles of money and at the same time stand a chance of
meeting with something that looked like real adventure.
“Do you know, Jack,” Bert said confidentially, “that I went into the
wireless game simply because it appeared to me to offer the best
chance of meeting Miss Adventure. I’ve been at it for five years now
and I’ve never even had the pleasure of getting a look at her face.
“Wherever I go she is always on the other side of the street and
although I tip my hat to her she never looks up, much less gives me
a tumble. I took that sealing job because I certainly thought I’d meet
Miss Adventure somewhere among the ice floes and blizzards of the
Arctic North. But no! all I did was to sit in my cabin and send what
my Captain wanted to tell your Captain and receive what your
Captain had to say to my Captain. And to what purpose? So that a
few rich men could get richer by enabling vain women to run around
the streets of New York and a few other big burgs bedecked out in
the skins of baby seals that had been clubbed to death. Now that’s
big business for men and women to be in, isn’t it?
“I wish I could get a job on a pirate ship or start a revolution in
some punk Central American country. And it’s funny,” he went on
complainingly, “how a fellow like you, who has only been in the
service a couple of years, could meet with a big adventure like the
sinking of the Andalusian, I’d have given a year of my life to have
been in your place.
“Now down along the Amazon River there are great rubber
plantations, savage tribes of Indians, tigers, monkeys, boa-
constrictors and all the garnishings that go to make up a first class
tropical jungle. I know a man in New York that does business with a
rubber concern in Para, Brazil and he told me, just before we sailed
north, that the Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil had a
contract to put up half a dozen wireless stations along the river.
“It strikes me, Jack, that it would be a good scheme if you and I
took a trip down there and looked over the ground. What do you
say?”
Having a few dollars in my pocket and nothing else to do at that
particular moment I said O K and agreed to join him provided we
could get free transportation on some liner going down there. Bert
assured me that he could fix it and he was as good as his word.
So it was we sailed in due time on the Ceara of the Holliday Line.
It was an old tub that stood every chance of having on board Miss
Adventure and I didn’t doubt in the least but that Bert would have
ample opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with her and to swim
back, if he got back at all, for the Ceara had no wireless equipment
—such was her regard for the laws of the U.S.
As luck would have it we had fine weather and she beat her way
down just as she had for the last quarter of a century if she was as
old as she looked. We enjoyed the trip, at that, for there were not
many passengers aboard and all of them, especially the South
Americans, were very pleasant people. Having learned that we had
never been in South America we were told that it was a great country
full of possibilities for young men with some capital but that if we
were unacquainted there it would be better for us to about face at
Para and go home.
Bert and I had other thoughts on the subject but as we were
nearing the Equator I kind of wondered why I had not stayed at
home selling crude-oil engines or taking the post on the new
Cunarder that Sammis said he’d get for me, or doing something else
that was nice and cool.
In a little less than a month’s time we landed at Para, as it is
popularly called, or Belem, as it is more properly called, or to give it
its full name Santa Maria de Del Belem do Para. Just as New
Orleans is built back from the Gulf of Mexico, on the Mississippi
River so Para is situated a hundred miles inland from the Atlantic on
the Amazon River. So this is Para from which Para rubber comes,
thought I as I looked about, and indeed I should have known it had I
sailed into port with my eyes shut for the smell of rubber everywhere
permeated the air.
But don’t think for a moment that it is made up of a lot of adobe
houses as so many Mexican towns are. Far from it, for in
architecture it is a miniature reproduction of Rio de Janeiro, which
city in turn looks more like Paris than any other in either North or
South America. Nor is Para a small burg, for it has a population of a
hundred thousand now and some day, if the Amazon valley is ever
developed, it may be larger than Rio de Janeiro, aye, even than New
York itself.
Different from the equatorial city I expected to find, where every
one had nothing to do but to lie under a palm tree, look at the blue
sky, smoke cigarettes and agitate the air with a fan, there was much
to do, for there rubber is King, and the white, yellow and black folks
were doing it with a good deal of vim too. The demand for rubber, we
learned, was greater than it had ever been before and consequently
the people were prosperous and happy.
After a deal of searching we located the offices of the Compagnie
Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil and Bert explained to Señor
Benoit, the manager, that we were a couple of wireless operators
from the United States. The manager acted as though he was dazed
and Bert handed him our credentials to set him right.
In a moment, though, he recovered and I wish you could have
seen the way he greeted us! You’d have thought he’d found two long
lost brothers for he hugged us in turn and almost wept on our necks.
I thought the heat and the smell of the rubber had made him nutty
where as it was only his great good luck. Believe me, he knew
exactly what it was all about.
He had come on from France six months before to put up a chain
of wireless stations beginning at Para and on up the river for 2500
miles to Equitos, at intervals of about 500 miles. Before the wireless
men got to Jurutty they had been taken down with the fever and
were even then on their way to Para, and so the job was open and
ready for us to tackle. He agreed to pay us a million reis, including all
our expenses and a million reis for every month we remained as
operators in his company’s service. It didn’t take half-an-eye to see
that if we could stick it out for a few months we’d be regular
millionaires.
“I want to make our wireless system a success to show the
Brazilian capitalists its superiority over the wire system. They have
an overhead line stretched along the banks of the river but it gives
very poor service for any one of a number of reasons, chief among
them being that it is hard to keep iron wires from rusting away owing
to the great amount of rain, and when copper wire is used the
Indians have a great liking for it and cut out a length here and there
whenever they want it.
“With wireless it is different and if I can only get the stations set up
and working I will show the advantages of it over the wire system
very quickly. Wireless will be safer and surer for the rains can’t affect
it and I am quite sure the Indians will not steal the ether.”
We took passage on the Asuncion, one of the Amazon Steamship
Company’s fleet of small steamers and sailed up the Rio Amazonia,
or as we call it the Amazon River, the mightiest of all flowing waters.
On either side of it for hundreds of miles lay a tangled mass of
tropical vegetation—the jungle in very truth. The villages were far
between but occasionally we saw the rude huts of a few settlers who
had come forth from the civilized quarters of the world to sap out
their energies and make their fortunes in rubber.
We were told that a mighty small area of the jungle had been
explored though a few expeditions had made their devious ways
through some parts of it either for scientific purposes, such as
studying the vegetation and living things, or for commercial reasons
as getting plants for medicines and more frequently rubber.
And rain! I can’t remember a day down there when it didn’t rain.
The reason it rains so much is this: the warm winds that blow up the
river from the Atlantic carry a lot of moisture with them and the winds
that blow down the river from the Andes are cold and when they
come together, the moisture condenses and it rains.
The scenery looked about the same all the way along—just one
mass of tropical trees of all kinds for the warp and these were woven
together with vines of every description for the woof. I could see our
finish before we started in to “look over the ground” as Bert had
suggested when we were in dear old New York. Yes, dear little old
New York—how I wished I were back there again.
As for rubber plantations they were there, the savage tribes of
Indians were there too—I didn’t see them on the trip up stream but
they were there all right just as Bert had said. There were no tigers
as Bert guessed but we saw the onca, or jaguar (pronounced ja-
gwar), a buff feline beast covered with black spots that is a second
cousin to the tiger in both size and ferociousness.
The whole blooming tribe of monkeys with faces on them that
ought to make a fellow ashamed to look at himself in a glass, and
make you know that Darwin was right; boa-constrictors and seven
million, more or less of other kinds of snakes were there—in fact
equatorial America was all that Bert, or I, or any one else, ever
dreamed it was and then multiply it by about a hundred and you will
get a faint impression of it. Yes, beasts, birds, fishes, snakes and
insects end without number, and each a marvel of its kind, were
there and so was the Indian princess.
There was the tapir, a sort of a cross between a horse and a
rhinocerous having a short proboscis as though its snout was made
of rubber and some one had stretched it for him; it is a shy and
harmless beastie that moves about chiefly at night. The sloth, a
greenish-brown animal whose chief business it is to hang back
downward from the branch of a tree and to sleep away its life.
The ant-eater who picks up a living by eating ants and other
insects. All hail to the ant-eater! I’ve seen a dozen other animals
down there that have no business outside of a jungle, or a zoo or a
menagerie. Lizards are there in great variety from those that change
their colors while you wait to those the natives serve up for you to
eat.
And talking about colors, no coal tar dye was ever discovered that
could begin to equal the plumage of the birds down there. Large
parrots called macaws, parakeets, which are little parrots with long
tails, cockatoos and love birds, which belong to the parrot family, and
others on down to humming birds that are scarcely larger than
wasps, are as thick as microbes in sour milk.
But the jungle is the paradise of the insects; there is every
conceivable kind and then as many more that are beyond human
belief: gigantic, gorgeous butterflies, beetles that looked as if they
had been stencilled with the rainbow colors of the sun, and flies as
numerous per square unit of space as grains of powder in the charge
of an 8 gauge shell.
The ants, though, have all the other insects faded and everything
else in the jungle that lives on the ground. Next to William
Hohenzollern’s armies that devastated Belgium and Flanders rank
the Amazon armies of ants that march out to seek what and whom
they can devour. Everything from a jaguar on down that gets in their
way becomes meat and drink for them.
You have, of course, often watched our little fireflies and
wondered what kind of an apparatus was installed in their anatomy
which produces the intermittent, phosphorescent light as they flit
around. Well, down in Brazil there are fireflies that look like electric
lights. They measure nearly 4 inches long, and 1¼ inches wide and
carry three light reservoirs—two in the thorax and one in the
abdomen—and these give off a bright greenish light.
When the natives want a light they simply catch a few fireflies, put
them in a bottle and cork it up. They could read by this light if they
could read but they can’t so the chief use to which they put the fire-
fly lights is to hunt around in their beds to see what has crawled in
with them. This, then, is the cheapest form of light and, according to
Sir Oliver Lodge, if man could produce an electric light with as little
expenditure of power as the fire-fly then a boy turning the handle of
an electric machine could light up a good sized factory.
The things that live in the Amazon River are just as plentiful as
those that inhabit the jungle. The manatee, or sea-cow as it is called,
is the largest having a length of something like 10 feet. If you were
far enough away from it you might mistake it for a seal for it has the
same general outline. Turtles grow to be 3 feet long, and oddsfish,
there’s enough different kinds to stock the seven seas and then have
some left over for the boarding houses.
I could talk to you for a week about the strange living creatures I
saw in and along the banks of the Amazon and in the jungle, but the
trees and plants are just as wonderful. For instance, there are palms
out of which palm-leaf fans are made and palm trees that grow up as
high as wireless masts and on their main trucks and pennants are
cocoanuts. Trees that when you tap ’em rubber, milk or cold water
comes forth depending on the kind of a tree it happens to be. Also a
large number of most uncommon fruits are there in great abundance.
At last we arrived at our destination, Jurutty, a village about 500
miles east of Manaos. When we landed my first and only thought
was of home and mother. My trip to the Arctic was a delightful little
pleasure jaunt as against this one up the Amazon River! Had I been
castaway on the moon, aye, even on Mars, I couldn’t have felt more
remote from my native land than when I stepped ashore at Jurutty.
And yet, would you believe it, now that it is in the past tense I would
like to go there once again.
We were met at the dock by Señor Castro, the fezendero, that is
the owner of the fezenda, which means the plantation. He was a
mixture of Portuguese and Indian but none the less a gentleman for
that. A motley crew of negroes, men, women and children with very
little clothing on and Indians who hadn’t the remotest idea why any
one should wear clothes at all, and mixtures of these races, were
also at hand to see the newcomers.
Señor Castro was right glad to see us and after shaking hands
with us half-a-dozen times he led the way back through a path in the
jungle to his fezenda. We dined in his home as I had never dined
before nor have since, drank coffee that threw the surpassing
beverage of the same name which is brewed in Child’s and the
Waldorf-Astoria in the shade and smoked his long tobacco wrapped
cigarettes.
Then we talked wireless. The apparatus, as Señor Benoit had
said, was there and Señor Castro assured us that we should have all
the help we needed to set it up. He told us that there was an electric
generator and a crude-oil engine to furnish the power to run it with—
and yet there were hundreds of thousands of horse power to be had
from the Amazon—but which had never been tapped. Fortunately I
happened to know all about the history, theory and practise of oil
engines and how to sell them if the alleged prospects had the
slightest idea of buying such power units.
Señor Castro also had a billiard table, a phonograph and other
civilized inventions to while away life as pleasantly as possible in the
jungle, and taking it all in all Bert and I considered that things were
not altogether against us.
After we turned in our bobbinet curtained beds that night all went
well until we were awakened in the small hours by the sound of a
woman’s voice outside. Thinking it was some female in distress Bert
awakened the fezendero only to be told with great courtesy that it
was not a woman but an organ bird. Bert returned saying something
about forming a Society for the Prevention of Jungle Noises at Night,
and we slept again.
In the morning Señor Castro took us out to show us his fezenda.
Three small horses were saddled ready for us to ride—though I can
ride a wave at sea much better than I can ride a quadruped on land.
We rode around his rubber plantation and Señor Castro showed us
how the rubber trees are tapped, explained that the fluid which
comes from the trees is not the sap of the wood but of the bark and
we saw how the natives stick little tin-cups to the trees with bits of
clay to catch the fluid.
On returning we rode along the edge of the jungle and Señor
Castro cautioned us “never to go into the jungle for you will either get
lost, be killed by jaguars, bitten by snakes, or by fever laden insects
which are just as bad.”
“To the south of us,” he went on calmly, “are the Caripunas—
aboriginal Indians that kill and eat people if they get a chance.”
“Cannibals?” I asked to make sure I had heard aright, and when
he said “yes” I could feel an electric oscillation run up and down my
spinal column.
“How far away from here are they?” questioned Bert with a
peculiar light in his eyes I had noticed whenever he spoke of
adventure.
“The village is about 200 kilometers from here,” Señor Castro
replied. “It’s strange but they seem to have some kind of a sixth
sense by which they can tell the moment strangers arrive—some
kind of a wireless telegraph system, I guess,” and he laughed.
Then he went on: “I don’t doubt but that they have been stalking
us because you fellows are new to the place. It’s seldom that any of
them ever come across this road because I’ve put bullets into a
couple of them and they won’t get away with any more of my rubber
men on this side of the line.”
I asked him if they had captured many of his men.
“Every time my men tread the jungle outside of the fezenda they
are taken unless they have an Indian guide with them.”
“Oh, I see, they are Union savages,” said Bert and he added, “I
know I’m going to like this place, Señor Castro.”
In the days that followed we got right down to business for we
wanted that million reis as soon as we could get it. We unpacked the
materials for the aerial first and every move we made was watched
with great interest by the villagers. The phosphor-bronze wire for the
aerial seemed to have an especial attraction for them, for they would
pick it up, look critically at it and examine it as carefully as though
they were looking for flaws in it.
There were two palm trees at least 100 feet high and about 250
feet apart, and Bert and I decided to use these for the masts. When
we had the aerial assembled with the leading-in wire soldered to it I
asked if any one there could climb the palm tree and every man,
woman and child said that they could. I gave one of the half-breeds a
coil of quarter-inch hemp rope to hoist the aerial with and showed
him how I wanted the end of the aerial made fast to the tree top and
then told him to go aloft.
I wish you could have seen that fellow climb the tree! I used to
think our old time sailors were about as clever as they made ’em
when it comes to climbing but there’s no use talking they’re too
civilized—too far removed from the monkey family to know how to
climb anything but a rope ladder.
The half-breed grasped the back of the tree with the open palms
of his hands and placing the bare soles of his feet in front like a jack-
knife he just naturally walked up it. These same fellows can travel for
miles through the jungle by swinging themselves from vine to vine
and going as fast as you or I can walk. So you see there are some
things an ignorant Amazonian can do that an educated New Yorker
can’t do. And thus does Nature’s law of compensation work out.
After we got the aerial swung between the palms we set the
engine and dynamo in place on their foundations and with some
tinkering we got them to running pretty smoothly. To Señor Castro’s
delight we had enough current not only to work the wireless set but
for lighting up his house as well. Last of all came the transmitter and
receiver and although these were of French make we had no
difficulty in either installing or operating them and it was a cinch to
get either Manaos on the west or Almeirir on the east.
It seemed that the operators at both stations could get us a deal
better than we could get them though all of the transmitters were
fitted with one kilowatt transformers. But never mind, we had
established communication, thus fulfilling our part of the agreement,
and Señor Castro, by all the arts of a true gentleman, showed us
how deeply he appreciated our work. Nothing was too good for us.
The only flaw in the whole system was the operator at Manaos. He
was like the sloth in that he was just as liable to go to sleep as he
was to stay awake.
I believe that every message I ever sent had something in it about
rubber, whether the body of it related to the doctor, medicines, or
what not, for along the Amazon River they live and die by that
commodity.
After we had been at Jurutty a few weeks Bert and I got so we
knew the fezenda about as well as its owner did and we walked or
rode about the place either alone or with Señor Castro for we made
it a point for one or the other to be on duty all the time and so make
a reputation for ourselves and for future United States operators who
might happen that way.
I often thought, in my rambles, that I could feel the presence of
some human being back of a tree, or see a human shadow come
and go before I could really make it out, but as this happened very
often I came to believe it was merely a case of nerves. I talked with
Bert about it and he said he frequently heard and saw things too but
that there was nothing more to it than a snake or an animal moving
about.
“Señor Castro,” he said, “has told us this little yarn about
cannibals so that we would keep inside the fezenda. There used to
be tribes of cannibals in the interior but all that sort of thing has been
wiped out by the Jesuit missionaries long ago.”
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