That’s right, I said MAX. A hip guy like me isn’t going to have something called MIN junking up my life. I’m top shelf all the way. The GoPro MAX is a fascinating action camera that does what other GoPro cameras like the Hero 10, 9, 8, 7… all can do (which is a lot) PLUS lets you get freaky, like so:
You can do a heck of a lot more with a 360 camera- like Google street view kinda stuff. And… you can also control the camera via GoPro’s Quick app with a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (it’s also got GPS in there, and voice command capability. It just impresses the heck out of me, but each one of these works against the battery life.)
So… what does it actually DO for Wi-Fi?
Being a wireless professional, I can’t leave well enough alone and simply enjoy the magic. I gotta know what’s in play with the MAX and it’s Wi-Fi capabilities. Anything and everything you’d like to know is here, but stay with me and I’ll boil it down for you.
It’s dual-band- works in both 5 GHz (.11ac) and 2.4 (.11n). It appears to default to 5 GHz, and it uses a whopping 80 Mhz channel width. That’s right, I said 80… Don’t believe me? Well maybe this will change your doubting mind:
For giggles, here’s the 2.4 GHz side of the MAX doing it’s thing:
It’s always interesting to me to see how they craft the WLAN antennas in various tight squeeze products, and the MAX is definitely a tight squeeze product. The complete take-it-apart views are here, but this is the antenna view from that series:
What about about power? This little guy isn’t as skimpy in that department as I expected it to be, at least not in some frequency slices:
I see no way to manually manipulate channel, channel width, or power output settings. So far I love the control via Wi-Fi, but I can also see where if you get a number of these and other late-model GoPros also doing wireless ops together at an event, they certainly could impact the business/visitor WLAN in a noticeable way. Such is Wi-Fi life.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to make a bunch of goofy round pictures that only I find interesting…
wirednot 