Hello ,

I have a Dynadish 5 and I need to lower the TX power from default , which I believe stands for full blast. :

The tx-power default setting is the maximum tx-power that the card can use and is taken from the cards eeprom

Unfortunately I cannot use the setting "card-rates" ,it is not available to me. Setting the Domain Regulatory-Domain to South Africa and gain of 25 means I get the very worst of TX rates. (-85)

I also understand that using the "all-rates-fixed" setting is bad for the hardware.

Note that it is not recommended to use 'all-rates-fixed' mode as the wireless card tx-power for the higher data rates is lower and by forcing to use the fixed tx-power rates also for the higher data rates might results the same problems like in the previous question about tx-power setting. In case of MikroTik Radio devices the power will not be higher that the power written in the eeprom. For most of the cases if you want to change the tx-power settings it is recommended to use the tx-power-mode=card-rates and it is recommended to lower and not to raise tx-power. In case of AR9300 and newer Atheros wireless chipsets "tx-power-mode=all-rate-fixed" is the only option as "card-rates" option isn't working on those chipsets.

So all that seems to be available , besides default is manual and I have no clue how to set that and which values need to be filled in where.

Can someone please guide me there ? I'm +- 3KM away from the sector I'm connecting to ( -53 signal strength) I'm using default , but with no Idea what the actual TX power is as it seem to be different per channel ? I think it might be over the legal of 200W eirp on the default setting.

You can always lower the power (when using regulatory-domain) by setting a higher gain than you actually have.

I have played around with that setting. If I set it to 25 dbi , the correct antenna gain my signal is very weak. So weak that the link is unusable. Personally I think the calculations for this setting is wrong (regulatory-domain). Probably giving you an EIRP of 4W or 1W. Not really sure what it does.

Even if I set the gain to 0 I get -69 TX signal strength , compared to -52 on default. ( I also get -69 when setting it to 17dbm (50mw) on the all rates fixed setting)

What I would like to do was to set it on 20 dbm (100mw) with the "card rate" setting. I know I can do this with the "all rates fixed" setting , but I'm not sure if this is a good idea due to the statements in the FAQ
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Wi ... he_best.3F

And then ... how do you set it when you are using the manual settings ? I have no idea what to enter in that table it gives you.

Even if I set the gain to 0 I get -69 TX signal strength , compared to -52 on default. ( I also get -69 when setting it to 17dbm (50mw) on the all rates fixed setting)

Sorry I see that this is not true ... I have tested on 0 gain and then get -58 which is what I was hoping for , but now have no Idea what the EIRP is or at what the current TX strength is as the "Current TX power" Table in winbox is blank

Ok so what I have done is to set it to regulatory domain and the antenna gain to 3. This gives more or less the same results as having it set to tx manual and to all card rates at 20 dbm (100mw).

If you work it out that adds up to 31.6W eirp which is well below the 200W limit in South Africa for point to point / point to multipoint in some cases.