I feel like I’ve had this same problem and for a while now with 2 of the Kami 1080P Dome Cams as well as point where audio drops out or the data rate comes to a sudden stop and 30 seconds to minutes pass and regular Yi home cams work fine. I’m not sure why this convo went radio silent but I would love to hear the answers or suggested troubleshooting steps to eliminate the device as just being poorly designed or built. So lets get to it…
First I went through layer 1, verified physical/logical connections from the camera network to my ISPs home-run cable into my home.
I checked my router for packets crossing the terrain and traffic was good. All firewall ports required open are good. No conflicts with IP addresses, no spoofed MACs either.
I’ve swapped cameras with other model Yi and Wyze cameras and they are fully functional in the same locations, same power source, same power cables, and same time, with combinations of external factors applied thought the entire troubleshooting process like distances, times of day. I’ve dedicated bandwidth priority, given static IPs to devices, and demilitarized them. Variants of those steps as well.
I stepped it up a notch by turning off all other 2.4 and 5Ghz devices, walked around with at floor-plans of my home and portable spectrum analyzer and created a heat map to measure RF signal strength at 2x2 grid layout/ref point. I have great coverage in the areas the cams are in. I’ve checked for spurious freqs and co-channel from nearby neighbor routers and that’s when I started to realize what I believe is the cause of the static. What I saw was basically better results at certain junctions but not any single point were these moments significant enough to say yes, that was the issue and here’s how to avoid or fix.
My private network starts out super easy to support, all routing and or switching is comprised of Netgear devices only. I have a 400Mb pipe into my home. Results were seen after I configured the router for 2.4 band isolation, meaning I shut off the 5Ghz and stuff started staying online with not much interference on any cams for this part. I should mention that I have approx. 55-60 devices on my network and about 25-30 are connected via wireless 2.5/5Gh. My router (Nighthawk X10 aka R9000) is able to provide 2.4 and 5Ghz signals with 4 antenna utilizing QPSK which is why the device count matters. Now this sounds complicated in a way but it’s not. There are only a few unused freqs in both bands (more in 5Ghz) which means having a ton of wireless devices and, your devices are dependent on one or the other band it is a problem for Yi cams ability to receive and maintain a network connection. If you have a ton of devices on 2.4 and no QoS for the cams themselves, its going to be interference due to bandwidth limitations at some point. If its 5Gz as your main pool for devices (rare) the its possible cochannel spacing which happens, or again, devices competing for that sweet 5ghz “time on air” Routers can only send and receive to a certain number of users, some routers manage this by quickly progressing through clients supper fast but again, there is a limit on how many clients it can handle without degradation of service. The Nighthawk X10 was my main router, and it is exceptional for anyone probably around 20-25 devices max. I went on and upgraded routers to the latest Netgear AX12. I basically mirrored the setup from one router to the other and left all device settings and passwords and all 55 devices walked onto the AX12 network with no dropped signals dupe IP addresses etc. I can swap through all 13 of my Yi Cameras along with downloading larger files on any of my laptops, as well as streaming services on tablets, PCs etc. Not one glitch for several hours straight. So, no signal droppings or interference but static is still present on only those two cameras. The QPASK expands the number of devices in the router’s capacity. So, the evidence all tells me that it’s the microphone and/or speaker layout. Or it could be a poorly tested mic that’s picking up levels which can’t be filtered by the crap processor found inside the cams themselves. I’m almost tempted to open one up and swap mics from another cam that sounds good. Put that bad camera speaker in a known good cam housing and see if the static moves with it. I’ll return the Yi Dome cams I bought to Amazon and keep Wyze for PTZ unless someone can explain what the problem is and how to fix or mitigate this annoying sound!
