Over the years I've become suspicious of the term beamforming.
In the hands of marketing people, having multiple antennas and choosing the one with the strongest signal, becomes "beamforming". Even a Cambium 450m I don't think does beamforming (in the sense of feeding multiple array elements with different phase delays to shape the antenna beam), it just has 14 narrow sectors inside. But that allows it to talk to multiple SMs at the same time. I think cellular antennas may use actual beamforming, I don't know. Tarana talks like they use active beamforming, but it could just be the usual marketing hype, again I don't know. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Adam Moffett Sent: Wednesday, October 8, 2025 5:11 PM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] 16 spatial streams how is that possible I suppose there's electronic beam forming, but could that really work with an array of 16 little dipoles in a circle? Since all the clients are 2x2, and the DSP magic to differentiate all those other chains has to come with a monetary and electrical cost that most consumers aren't going to pay, I'm guessing that a16x16 router would just be a bicycle with 14 extra wheels. _____ From: Adam Moffett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Sent: Wednesday, October 8, 2025 5:51 PM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] 16 spatial streams how is that possible What could you theoretically subtract from the raw received signal to leave you with one desired transmission distinct from the others? It's the 21st century, so we don't need to worry about how computationally intensive it would be; we only need to worry about whether you could do it. For instance, if I have 16 different QAM constellations on top of each other, but I knew they each had a certain phase offset, then could I separate them? What about a time offset? And oh boy, what if there's one 802.11n client on the WLAN? He's 2x2 and doesn't have the magic to handle 8 or 16 chains. Whenever the AP sends a frame to that guy does it have to temporarily stop transmitting on all the other chains? I bet it does. -Adam _____ From: AF <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > on behalf of Ken Hohhof <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Sent: Wednesday, October 8, 2025 3:07 PM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: [AFMUG] 16 spatial streams how is that possible In the list of supposed advantages of WiFi7 over WiFi6, I see 16 spatial streams vs 8. Can someone explain to me the mechanism for using 16 spatial streams in a typical WiFi environment? I have a hard time wrapping my head around anything more than 2 using V/H or dual slant polarization. I was willing to believe that maybe you could get more (like maybe 4 spatial streams) due to reflections off furniture and stuff, and that somehow signal processing could magically separate out the streams (even though I don't understand how it does that). But 8 or 16 just sounds like crazy talk. Maybe it's like the rich people houses with 16 car garages, if I were rich people I would understand?
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