Installation & first run

Roughly an hour once the hardware is on the bench. Each step ends in something you can observe, so a failure is located rather than guessed at.

Standing it up

1. Seat the card and confirm the driver — Boot the Agent box and check the radio is bound. If iw dev returns no interfaces, the driver has not attached and nothing downstream will work.
2. Install the tools — iw, wpa_supplicant and iperf3 on the Agent; iperf3 on the LAN receiver.
3. Set MANGOWIFI_DATA_DIR — The config file location comes from this environment variable and nothing else. There is no CLI flag — this is the single most common way to end up editing a config the app never reads.
4. Configure the Agent — Role Agent, a listen address and port, and a pair token.
5. Configure the Console — Role Console, the Agent's address and port, the same pair token, then the target SSID and PSK — plus band, channel and bandwidth if you are pinning them.
6. Pick a setup mode — Over-the-air is the customer's environment; wired-RF with SMA cabling and attenuators is the repeatable one. Each catalog row records which mode it expects.
7. Run Baseline — Twenty-four checks that answer whether the rig is ready at all. Fix anything red before reading a performance number.
8. Run a short Wi-Fi 8 row — Start with the 30-second p95 row before committing to a 30-minute endurance run.

export MANGOWIFI_DATA_DIR=/opt/mangowifi   # role is read from $MANGOWIFI_DATA_DIR/config.json

The target PSK is elided from debug output rather than logged. If you are diffing configs by hand, expect it to be absent from traces.