WLPC Phoenix 2026: Here's What You Missed

The Hamina team kept busy at WLPC Phoenix 2026 with four presentations covering everything from site survey sins to AI-powered floor plans and the story behind the Clip. Oh, and Jussi received the 2026 WLPC Lifetime Achievement Award. GO JUSSI! 🏆

Image by Drew Lentz

If you couldn't make it to Phoenix, or just want to relive the highlights, here's a summary of the presentations our team gave. You can watch all presentations on the WLPC YouTube channel.

7 Deadly Sins of Site Surveys

Presenter: Grant Shelley

Site surveys are a huge part of Wi-Fi engineering, yet dedicated talks on the topic are surprisingly rare at WLPC. Luckily, our very own Grant set out to fix that.

His seven sins cover the full site survey lifecycle, from kick-off to walking out the door:

1. Skipping the scoping conversation. No Wi-Fi questionnaire means no shared understanding of what the customer actually needs, or what you're being paid to deliver.
2. Accepting a bad floor plan. A crayon sketch won't cut it. Get the as-built architectural drawings, or you might arrive to find a whole wing that isn't on your map.
3. Not defining scope on the floor plan. "Wi-Fi everywhere" rarely means the elevator shaft or the plant room. Walk through the floor plan with the customer and confirm what's in and what's out.
4. Poor site access planning. PPE, key cards, escort requirements, and security clearances all need to be sorted out before you show up. And bring your own hard hat.
5. Wrong tools for the job. Grant's a phone-first surveyor for good reason: one-handed use, great camera for picture notes, and screen brightness that actually holds up outdoors.
6. Leaving hard areas until last. Operating theatres and secure wards have narrow access windows. Survey them first before you find yourself stuck on a Thursday afternoon waiting for a Tuesday morning access window.
7. Forgetting about the people. The project contact often doesn't know what's actually happening on the ground. Introduce yourself to the people who work there daily, as they can tell you things no one else will.

7 Ways to Prevail as a Wireless Expert

Presenters: Henrik Aalto & Valtteri Aurela

AI isn't here to replace wireless experts. It's here to take the tedious work off their hands. Henrik and Valtteri from Hamina's ML team showed what that looks like in practice with a deep dive into the new Hamina Planner feature, AI-powered wall detection.

Drop a floor plan into Hamina, and within seconds it identifies walls, classifies them into up to 10 categories (concrete, drywall, glass, windows, doors, elevator shafts, and more), and groups them by drawing style - because walls drawn the same way on a floor plan are almost always the same material in real life. That insight is what makes the feature powerful: instead of manually labeling every wall, you just assign a material to each group, and you're done.

Building that required a serious investment. Five dedicated annotators spent months labeling millions of wall segments across thousands of floor plans covering hotels, hospitals, warehouses, data centers - anything they could get their hands on. The model went through over 200 training runs totaling more than 1,200 hours before it was ready.

The payoff is a workflow that used to take hours and now takes seconds. Drop in multiple floors, and Hamina aligns them, builds a 3D model of the entire building, and automatically propagates your material assignments across every floor. The feature is now available in beta.

Want the full story? 👉 Read Henrik and Valtteri's blog post.

The Struggle of Creating a Fast and Frictionless and (Almost) Free Wi Fi Tool

Presenter: Jussi Kiviniemi

How do you go from doodles on a reMarkable to a shipping hardware product? Jussi walked through the full story of building the Hamina Clip, including the setbacks and redesigns.

The key design decisions were made early on:

• Two radios are enough for fast, large-scale surveys if the scanning algorithm is smart enough (just don't take it to a game-day, triband stadium).

• No built-in spectrum analyzer. Channel utilization and Wi-Fi interference analysis is doable with just a Wi-Fi chipset, and if you want the raw spectrum, the Oscium Nomad with NXT-2000 will work great for that.

• Make it small enough that it's always with you, connecting instantly, no cables, no decisions to make.

From there, it was years of concepting, prototyping, and course-correcting. The process included multiple redesigns, including one that failed RF testing and another one that looked too much like a soap dish.

In the end: a compact, IP64-rated, factory-tuned device that can survive being dropped onto concrete from 5 feet. Multiple times. Though we do not encourage you to test that yourself.

WLAN Pi Project Update: Wi-Fi Analysis on the Go

Presenter: Jerry Olla

The WLAN Pi project has been a staple of the WLPC community for years, and Jerry Olla stopped by to share what the team has been up to lately, including a brand-new initiative: the WLAN Pi Development Sprint. Held right before WLPC Phoenix, developers and users gathered in person to brainstorm, fix bugs, and ship code. In just three days, the team closed 15 out of 16 newly identified issues and shipped a new feature.

On the hardware side, the star of the show was the WLAN Pi Go - a compact device that attaches directly to your smartphone via MagSafe and USB-C. Powered by a Raspberry Pi CM4 and an Intel BE200 (Wi-Fi 7), it comes in two flavors: the standard Go with an accessory port for Oscium spectrum analyzers, and the slimmer Go Slim for those who just need scanning, packet capture, and AP finding.

The Go is supported by a growing app ecosystem, including the official WLAN Pi app for OTA updates and device profiling, Hamina Onsite for triband site surveys on the go, Intuitics' packet capture app with full Wi-Fi 7 support, and Wi-Fi Explorer Pi (now officially on the App Store with native WLAN Pi Go support). Wi-Fi HaLow support and CBRS scanning are also on the project's radar, so there's plenty more to come.