F5x wifi setup and verification and mac address filtering

Setting up my new F5x tonight. Used garmin express to setup two wifi networks. 1) home network 2) my mobile hotspot.
My home network uses mac address filtering. Mobile hotspot does not.

I wanted to do two things. Add the F5x to my "allowed" mac address, and 2nd, test out that wifi is working.

Issue was that I got the following error when entering the mac address on my comcast xfinity router. The issue is only the first byte, the "43"

Please enter valid MAC address!
First byte must be even.
Each character must be [0-9a-fA-F].

Question: has anyone else seen this or have any suggestions?
Question: other ideas or suggestions on how to test that wifi connectivity is working?

0 gasteropod over 8 years ago

I was intrigued by this, since an odd number in the first byte indicates that this is a multicast address. I checked and found the same thing, my mac address starts 8f (0d143) which would appear to be a multicast address.

Anyway, I think I got to the bottom of this. I could not believe this was correct so looked at my dhcp server logs and wap logs and find that the watch reports the address in the opposite order to that shown by the logs i.e. the address does not start 8f, but ends 8f! The leading numbers of the mac address which denote the manufacturer are (reading backwards from the watch) 14:8f:21 which is owned by Garmin:

14:8F:21 GarminIn # Garmin International

So, you need to reverse the order of the digits when entering into your router. I have no ideas why the watch reports this in reverse order. Probably a bug :)

0 jetguat over 8 years ago

I was intrigued by this, since an odd number in the first byte indicates that this is a multicast address. I checked and found the same thing, my mac address starts 8f (0d143) which would appear to be a multicast address.

Anyway, I think I got to the bottom of this. I could not believe this was correct so looked at my dhcp server logs and wap logs and find that the watch reports the address in the opposite order to that shown by the logs i.e. the address does not start 8f, but ends 8f! The leading numbers of the mac address which denote the manufacturer are (reading backwards from the watch) 14:8f:21 which is owned by Garmin:

14:8F:21 GarminIn # Garmin International

So, you need to reverse the order of the digits when entering into your router. I have no ideas why the watch reports this in reverse order. Probably a bug :)

Yes! you beat me to post my own answer. Since the F5x doesnts stay connected very long, its not that easy to "catch it" while connected. I didnt look at dhcp logs, but my samsung s7 left a log for the devices connected, and in there, I found an unidentified device that, upon closer inspection was the F5x mac address, in reverse.

I agree its probably a bug in the software. I forgot how to submit bug reports on the Fenix. There was an email address I think.