OS X Leopard Airport Scanning Driving You Crazy? A Possible Fix

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[UPDATE 2: 10 Nov. 2008: Downloading the AirPort Extreme Update 2008-004 (1.0) did the job for me.  Two days in and no drops, much faster load speeds.

From the Apple Downloads site: "This update is recommended for all Intel-based Macintosh computers running Mac OS 10.5.5."

NOTE: I don't have Airport Extreme. I have an old Airport Express and a Linksys. But it still fixed the problem.

Good luck! Let us know if this did or did not work for you! ]

[Update: See comments for more news on this.]

Is anybody else experiencing Airport Wireless “airport scanning” weirdness in OS X Leopard?  Since upgrading to Leopard, my wireless disconnects constantly to scan for other networks – when the network I’m on works fine. My Airport signal is also lower since the upgrade.  I know it’s a problem because it’s affecting four – that’s right, four – separate Macs I’ve been using since Leopard came out. And I’m not the only person having this problem, as a quick glance at Apple’s support forum shows.

If you’re having this problem too, this free download, AP Grapher, might help. Since installing it a few minutes ago, I haven’t dropped connection at all. Here is some guidance from the Apple Support forum:

Hi guys

I too have been going INSANE because Apple can’t seem to sort this out. Its enough to drive you mad – especially when they still aren’t acknowledging it as a problem.

Download AP Grapher from here: http://www.chimoosoft.com/products/apgrapher/

Run the program while you browse…In preferences, I set the scanner to refresh every 10 seconds, and the Grapher to refresh every second. Although I’m still experiencing dropouts, the constant activity means they aren’t noticeable at all. It really does seem to work well because it reconnects immediately

The Grapher is also helpful – the Tx rate (yellow) will show you what’s going on and how frequently the connection drops.

…and no – i don’t work for chimoosoft!

Happy camping, Owen

If you’re more tech-savvy than I am, and have a solution for me and others, please drop a comment and help us all out – thanks in advance.

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  • Rene

    O yeah, one more thing: don’t forget your newly bought Apple will probably have an 802.11n airport card inside. Make sure you upgrade the rest to this standard, because all 802.11b/g stuff will experience problems. Maybe one of you want to exchange your old 802.11b/g AirPort Express into my new 802.11n?
    Cheers!

  • Neil deMause

    Just bought a Macbook, and discovered this problem, which is driving me bonkers. Tried the Airport update, it had no effect. Already tried switching channels on the router… any other ideas?

  • kortnie

    1 have leopard but 10.5.4 will this update still work 4 me? this scanning bull is making me hate the internet.

  • Neil deMause

    There’s a 10.5.6 system update out today, which is supposed to “improve Airport connections.” Haven’t tried it yet – anyone else?

    • Clay Burell

      Neil:

      At this point I’m too skeptical to say for sure, but I did just install the “Mac OS X Update” (10.5.6) and have had fast loads ever since.

      I’ll post again in a couple days to confirm the news is still good.

      Thanks much for the tip.

  • Jeff Imig

    10.5.6 did not fix it for me.

    I installed the upgrade on two computers (bought in August 2008): a mac mini and a macbookpro.

    The macbookpro seems to be better but the mini is not. As a reminder… to me at least… wireless worked fine on both until upgrading the os the first time around… sometime after aug 1 I think.

    Jeff

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  • http://www.snipe.net snipe

    Hi guys,

    Thanks for all of the great tips here – just wished any of them worked. I’ve had my new MBP (17″) for maybe two months, am up to date on all software updates, am set to channel 5, do not have realplayer as a login item, etc etc. I’ve just installed AP Grapher and am running the ping in the background, but it is OBSCENE to me that SO many people are having the exact same problem and this still hasn’t been addressed. Upgrading to 10.5.6 did squat to help, despite the supposed Airport improvements.

    I was so insane over this, I thought it might be my router, despite the fact that I had heard MBPs in particular had issues with this. I went out and spent $180 on an Airport Extreme, hoping the additional antenna from the n protocol would make a difference. It didn’t.

    For me, my connection will be fine, and then I can tell its slowing down. If I click on the Airport icon and let it scan, the connection comes back – but the signal was solid, so it should never have been dropped in the first place.

    This is utterly maddening. I have been extolling the virtues of mac since being forced to switch for work, and after this BS, my husband will never want to deal with this crap. I’m so fed up, I’m ready to fire up my old Dell and leave my MBP at work, since I know THAT doesn’t have any wifi issues.

    snipes last blog post..Using IP Geolocation and Radius Searching with PHP/MySQL

  • Neil deMause

    10.5.6 didn’t work for me either, nor did AP Grapher, pinging in background, Little Snitch, or any of the other solutions suggested. I was considering trying an Airport Express, but won’t if people are still having problems with those.

    Just as snipe describes, I can restore the connection by clicking on the Airport icon and having it rescan – setting AP Grapher to rescan more frequently seems to make the dropouts shorter, too, but unfortunately the shortest interval it allows is 10 seconds.

    And for the record, I have Boot Camp installed on this Macbook, and I get no dropouts when I’m booted into Windows. So this is definitely an OS X 10.5 problem. “Utterly maddening” about says it all.

  • http://www.snipe.net snipe

    Hi Neil,

    Please do let me know if you find something that works. I’m subscribed to this blog post, and I started my own blog post about it, just to keep all of the possible fixes straight. I’ll be updating it as I find more potential solutions, but I’m so exasperated right now. :( The ping/AP Grapher solution seems to be the most fruitful, but its still not awesome.

    snipes last blog post..Airport in OSX Dropping Wifi Connection

  • Neil deMause

    Here’s another good comment thread on this, though no solutions that have worked for me there, either.

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  • http://mvajda.blogspot.com matej

    The pinging solution works for me in 10.4.11 MacBook to Ruckus MediaFlex router. Now I need to find a way to make this pinging script run in the background, without having the terminal icon in the dock, since I don’t ever need it and it’s just taking up space…

    matejs last blog post..The Band From – One Spring Away

  • dfvera

    My two cents …

    I have a MacBook Pro 15″ and had NO wireless issues while running Tiger. After upgrading to Leopard, I have all the problems outlined above and no solution with all installed updates, etc.

    NOTHNG WORKS AS PROMISED WITH APPLE anymore …
    Not my iPhone 3G
    Not my iPod
    Not Mobile Me
    Not Leopard

    Their products have gone to hell and remind me of Microsoft 10 years ago when nothing worked.

    This appears to be yet another case of a company trying to grow too fast and leaving any issues for consumers to suffer with.

    I’m no longer purchasing any Apple products.

  • Neil deMause

    Well, I have a solution, but it was neither cheap nor easy. After a trip to the shop found no problems with the Airport card, I broke down and bought an Airport Extreme router, to see if that would help. Test results showed:

    * Airport Extreme set to b/g/n compatible: same problem.

    * Airport Extreme set to n only, at 2.4 GHz: same problem.

    * Airport Extreme set to n only, at 5 GHz: Blazing fast connection speeds, not a single lost packet, even in rooms of my house where wireless reception was previously only a rumor.

    What seems to be going on here, if I may speculate a bit, is that Leopard gets easily distracted by competing networks, so if you’re in a location with a lot of 2.4GHz traffic (like me, with neighbors all around), it can’t handle it. The solution is to get the hell off of 2.4GHz, but that requires giving up on b/g connections, since those won’t work on 5GHz.

    Unfortunately, we also have a Windows laptop in the house that doesn’t have an n wireless card. So until we can buy one, right now I have my old b/g router daisy-chained to my new Airport Extreme, serving up a separate subnet just for the sake of the Windows laptop. My friend who helped me set this up characterized this as “insane,” but hey, it works.

    Snipe and others, if you try this solution, please report back if it works for you as well.

    • http://www.snipe.net snipe

      Neil – you are my freaking HERO. Thank you so much for posting back to this topic with what you found. That fix seems to have worked for me too. Its been over 24 hours and no signal dropping at all. Keep your fingers crossed, but I think this may have worked!

      I updated my blog post to reflect that – hopefully we can save a few more people from these headaches.

      snipes last blog post..Advertising on Facebook Applications – An Experiment

  • http://www.snipe.net snipe

    Hi Neil – thanks for posting this. I do have a windows laptop, but I barely ever use it, so it hasn’t been a factor for me. I want to say I tried switching to N-only on my Airport Extreme, but I honestly tried so many different things, I can’t even remember now. I know that we don’t have a lot of wireless connections where I live (I’m on the side of a mountain), but I’ll try anything at this point.

    Its bafling to me how intermittent it is. I can go for hours with no problems at all – and then another hour where its dropping every 20 seconds and I can’t even finish FTPing text files to my server without the connection breaking. No change in surrounding wifi networks during this time.

    I’ll give it a go when I get home, although it will likely take a few days before I know if it worked, since it’s not a problem I can reproduce. Will post back here with my results tho.

    snipes last blog post..Buy or Sell Unwanted Gift Cards Online For Amazing Deals

  • http://www.snipe.net snipe

    dfvera – I can appreciate your frustration, but as a former windows user and fairly new apple convert, I have to say that despite this (incredibly aggravating) issue, I have had no problems with apple stuff. I have an ipod and an iphone, a macbook pro and mobileme, and haven’t had any issues at all, save this one. I’m sorry you’re having such a hard time of this – maybe you can try Neil’s solution?

    snipes last blog post..Airport in OSX Dropping Wifi Connection

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  • Walt

    The apple support download is ONLY for 10.5.5, and will not install on the latest 10.5.6. I am obviously here since I still have the problem. Was the fix supposedly rolled into 10.5.6?

  • jny

    One thing that folks should be aware of:

    If the Airport (or whatever wireless router is set to be 11n-ONLY (also known as “greenfield”) it can and will ignore (and disrupt) any neighboring Access points in the area.

    If you can see your neighbor’s 802.11b/g wireless, and you put 11n greenfield on the same or adjacent channels, you will be causing them interference that their equipment won’t recognize as wireless. You might as well unshield a microwave oven and sit it next to their house. Try to make sure that you’re using a vacant channel (and there are only 3 usable in north america on 2.4Ghz: 1, 6, 11) so as to be a nice network neighbor.

    Better yet, use a 5Ghz frequency if at all possible.

  • migwuk

    One thing I would like to point out. I bought an imac new in 2008. leopard has never allowed my imac to stay connected using the airport card that came with the machine. I do have windows xp installed on a boot camp partition. xp never looses a connection, ever. I can play games online, 46 hours straight is my wireless record. no problems what so ever. anybody know why xp using the bootcamp drivers has no problems?

  • Neil

    Are you using the 5GHz setting on your router? If not, try it. And if your router can’t handle 5GHz, you may need to get a new router.

    As for why OS X has this problem and not Boot Camp, the explanation seems to be, as I wrote above, that “Leopard gets easily distracted by competing networks, so if you’re in a location with a lot of 2.4GHz traffic (like me, with neighbors all around), it can’t handle it.” What this says about the quality of Leopard shall be left as an exercise for the reader.

  • Jordan

    Do you need the Airport extreme or can you use any N router that can use a 5 Ghz frequency??

  • Michael

    I have been having these troubles for months… why don’t apple do something about it? I am so frustrated with it, it has wasted so much of my time. How do you change a router setting to 5Ghz?

  • http://www.snipe.net snipe

    Hi Michael,

    Open the Airport Utility, find your router i the list, and click on Manual Setup. Click on the Wireless tab and select the 5ghz option from the Radio Mode dropdown

    snipes last blog post..SVN Working Copies and Repository Locations

  • schande

    After months and months of trying about everything that i could find on the web about this problem, i finally had the opportunity to leave my macbook pro at the apple helpdesk for a few days. They replaced the airport card [for free] and since then [1 week ago] i’ve had no network drops.

    Finally, after 6 months, my macbook is unbricked. I am as happy as a child.

  • rolisize

    I solved my constant scanning issue, well so far( 1 week), i bought a dual band router from d-link its the Model: DIR-825, it runs 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz bands simultaneously, and it been working great, fast, no dropouts or scanning, i have a macbook pro unibody, macbook air, and a macbook running on the 5 ghz side, and my mac mini, ps3, arhcos 5, G1 phone on the 2.4ghz side, i’ll keep you posted

  • rolisize

    just a follow up to my last post…still NO problems with scanning with the new dlink dual band router going on 4 weeks, so far so good!

  • charter57

    So I have an iMac and have heard that my problem is everything from a crowded 2.4 GHz band to the aluminum casing around my computer causing interference. Whatever it is, I’ve (KNOCK ON WOOD) solved the problem simply by changing the channel on my router. I just logged on my router’s IP site and fiddled with the channel. I was on the default (6) and first tried 9 which didn’t work (perhaps because it was too close to the 11′s and 6′s that are operating in my vicinity according to AP Scanner. Then I tried 3, which was totally out of the way of local traffic. Problem solved.

  • Ross

    I have this problem with rpeated scanning on Airport on my 2 year old MacBook. It is driving me crazy as well. I live in the country so there are no competing networks. When I go to Airport Utility it doesn’t even show my wireless network regardless of how close i am to it physically. I am using a Linksys Wireless G router.

    Any ideas?

  • BCW

    FWIW…

    I happened on this thread because I was having the problem with an Intel Mac Mini running 10.5.6 and 10.5.7.

    I have an external hard drive that normally sits on top of the Mini. After trying many of the suggestions from posts on this thread and elsewhere, and getting nowhere, it occurred to me that perhaps some subtle shift in position of the HDD unit was somehow interfering with the Airport antenna. I moved the HDD about a foot away – problem solved immediately.

    I suspect there are many causes for this issue, but if you have other equipment near your Mac, simply moving stuff around is a pretty easy thing to try.

    Good luck, all…

  • Jared

    This thread was fascinating to me, as well as very discouraging. I’ve had these same problems with my MacBook Pro since I switched to Leopard a while back. I tried all the solutions about with no luck. The most frustrating thing about it is that my older iBook G4 (running 10.4) can sit right next to my MacBook Pro and get perfect signal and connectivity. I think I may try to take them both to an Apple store and show them how ridiculous this is.

  • http://mokumvonamsterdam.blogspot.com mokum von Amsterdam

    Same horror here: perfect signal but no traffic going through the air. Only a stop & start of the Airport in my MBP [unibody late 2008] restores functionality.
    Ranging from removing IPv6 to changing channels, from ditching my WRT54GS to buying an Airport Extreme, from airport radar widget to KisMAC I have tried it all… with 0 result.

    I have 4 macs & iPhones. The iPhones are the only devices working flawlessly.

    And of course if I boot any other OS [XP via bootcamp, Linux&BSD via USB stick or CD] then the wireless works flawlessly.

    My Wi-Spy 2.4x [see http://www.metageek.net/ is not of too much use since it does not work with the 'n' [5Ghz] range.

  • Michayla

    I just rearranged my preferred networks in my network preferences, and that seemed to fix the problem of constant scanning… at least for now. I just made sure that the network I was trying to use was at the top of the list– and, no, none of the other networks in range are anywhere on my preferred network list.

  • Markettingtrick

    Thanks man it,seems better.

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