Time capsule and 5GHZ Channels

Which country is it set to??

Sometimes Apple limit the wireless deliberately due to your local regulations.. but I have heard of people in Euro country selecting another and it can help.. whether it is legal or not you will need to determine.

There are actual output restrictions on some channels. And there is no way to force the TC to pick a particular channel.. that is what auto means.. it is auto.

Nothing stays the same.. The TC is marketed in different regions with highly variable set of controls, because each country have different rules, especially on 5ghz.

See the wiki.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

Try within the limited selection if a different country helps.

As LaPastenague mentions, Apple markets different versions of the TC in different regions. You are limited only to the countries that are displayed on the device that you have.

If U.S. does not appear as an option on your device, then you cannot "switch" to a U.S. version.

As with Bob.. the setting is fixed in the factory.. there is no US firmware or Euro firmware. The firmware is common around the world but the settings in the TC are burned in at the factory.

Each time you restart the TC it will do a channel search before allocating a channel. I am not sure if it happens at any other time. A quick restart and it may change but you should be able to set channel manually within the range that is available. It is just that I am not sure that the TC is going to follow the manual selection in the latest version.

You set channels in wireless options at the bottom of the wireless tab.

You should have several countries available in the list in wireless options.. I would have a go at testing with it set to one of your neighbouring countries.

Otherwise sorry but you are locked out.. hacked firmware is very unlikely. Although serial console access is definitely possible. Sadly the TC is just too expensive to start doing experiments on.. and it will require extraordinary fine soldering. So for now on a Gen 5 you can put that out of your mind.

It is actually possible to nudge the latest Airport Time Capsule to stick to specific 5GHz channels. It isn't straigh forward though and you can only do so much because as many of the other contributors to this question mentioned you can only tweak it within the allowed regulatory framework that the hardware comes built with. In other words you can only select from channels allowed in your region for each frequency. But this is fine because in the European Union all of the channels you mention (and more) are allowed.

However...

In Airport Utility App, once you select the Airport device go to File and select Export Configuration File. You can open this file in any basic text editor, and in it you will find all the settings. You will see (many times repeated) a range of different available frequencies and channels. You can remove the channels that (for some reason) do not interest you and save the configuration file.

The next step is to Import Configuration File into the device and restart it with the new settings.

Unfortunately the use of the configuration file is a bit experimental because as far as I know there aren't any public domain papers on how to change these settings, but I have been successful at forcing my Airport Time Capsule to stick to Ch. 100 under 5GHz at all times by playing with the configuration file and removing all references to channels that I do not want it to use.

Excellent work.

The idea of forcing the channel when this is removed from the end user, by simply deleting all the other possible channels from the exported config file never entered my mind.

I have tried deleting all regions in the config file and then change the channels on the region left, to enable the higher channels under 5Ghz network.

After importing the edited config file nothing has changed, still got all the regions in the list and only the channels < 48 available.

How can I fix it up ?

thank you !

You cannot enable higher channels if they are not allowed in your country. The removal of channels is fine.. adding them is not fine.