Wi-Fi standards change quickly and after some time your measurement devices can still do wireless surveys for design and tweaking, however when a new Wi-Fi standard comes out you can't capture the newest frame types since you need hardware to support it.
Usually AP hardware is quite quick to come to market to support the new standards.
At this time I'm using an Ekahau Sidekick 1 since we only have that for about 3 years now. That device can still be used to measure RF energy (site surveys). However since the chips inside those devices ship with two 802.11ac NIC's inside you cannot capture 802.11ax traffic. You could say, just upgrade to the Sidekick 2 which would be correct. But that takes a long time of nagging in my company and presenting of usecases before they will finally invest that 4k for the new device 😉 And then when we have that device after a few years the Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) standard will be out and I will once again not be able to capture those frames.
Wouldn't it be awesome that outside of the regular dashboard based packet captures we can do on AP's (which cannot capture frames coming from that same AP btw) we would be able to do local packet captures with a mobile AP connected to a small PoE switch and a laptop with wireshark?
We wouldn't have to worry about the dashboard not taking that giant amount of traffic and then having to download it via the internet and everytime a new standard comes out we can just use the newest AP to perform such packet capturing for troubleshooting purposes and education of the new frametypes and information elements.
Of course this would make sense to add this feature to the site survey mode of an AP since it has to be able to be booted offline. And then of course the site survey mode should be stable and without bugs!
