[lifeisstillgood]

As someone who just "plugs and hopes" what steps should one take in building a small network - from running basic scans to see what else is in the area, strengths, and simply going "screw it lay down some cable"

What's the best practise in other words

[patrakov]

The trick is to choose a list of potential noise-free channels in the 5 GHz band, instead of one channel. Ideally channels that require DFS in at least one country, because a lot of cheap customer-grade network equipment (other than wireless cards) has them hard-disabled. E.g. TP-Link Archer C7 cannot be set to channel 56 using the stock firmware, even though the hardware itself is perfectly capable of transmitting on this channel and of radar detection. In short, DFS channels are good because you know your neighbors will not be using them.

Then install OpenWrt (even on that TP-Link Archer C7 if you want), set "channels" to the list of channels that you identified (unfortunately this property is available only from the command line), and "channel" to auto. Then OpenWrt will select one of these channels after a one-minute delay, and jump away (but only to another known-good channel) if there is a radar.