I wanted to share a quick trick for troubleshooting Cisco Proximity. For those that haven’t stumbled onto this particular technology, Proximity is a feature in Spark Connected and Traditional Cisco Video Endpoints that provides a pairing channel for screen sharing. Specifically, the codec announces its presence and connection information via 22khz audio stream. The client device then uses that connection information to make a connection over the network and share the screen with the codec. Since 22khz is beyond what the human ear can hear, there is a need for some other tool to check for its presence.
The tool I use to check for the pairing channel presence is SpectrumView and is available in the Apple App Store.
There are a couple options that need to be manually configured before the tool displays the higher frequency used for the pairing process:
- Recording – Audio Sampling Rate 48000
- Display – This may be necessary to adjust if you don’t see anything. I typically set mine to about 15dB
With the proper settings and within range of a proximity enable device, some output should be visible just above 20kHz.
Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. This may or may does not reflect the position of past, present or future employers.
