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This is Sean from Veriwave. Interestingly enough, recently some of our customers have been actually sticking antennas on the front of our test cards and running tests with hundreds of simulated clients in an open-air environment. We even make a ???¡é?¡é?????¡­?¡°high-powered radio???¡é?¡é???????? test card specifically for such open-air testing.



Some time ago our CTO tried a little unofficial ???¡é?¡é?????¡­?¡°field experiment???¡é?¡é???????? on the weekend before a large IEEE conference. He took a couple of our portable boxes into the main hall and tried to see how many clients could be loaded up on the conference Wi-Fi network. He was hoping for 1500, but only got to about 700-800 before bits of the infrastructure started keeling over. A few problems were found with VLANs, DHCP and firewalls this way.



So yes, while Wlanman09 is right (our equipment is certainly not cheap, and is primarily intended for controlled RF tests) it can be used, and has been used, for uncontrolled open-air tests similar to what you describe. In fact, we even offer a ???¡é?¡é?????¡­?¡°network stressing service???¡é?¡é???????? for those that want to run such tests but don???¡é?¡é?????¡é???¡ét want to buy the equipment.