802.11n at 300Mbps (finally working)

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

I’ve pretty much wasted my entire weekend fiddling with a wireless link between our offices (either side of a public road). The problem was finally found in another thread (http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/r52hn-impossible-to-use-400-mbps/55516/1).

2 x RB433AH
2 x R52Hn
2 x 30 inch Dual Polarised 5.4GHz Parabolic Dish antennae

I climbed up and down, aligned and re-aligned the dishes, changed cards, pig tails, cables and was contemplating getting alternative (even bigger) dishes on Monday, until I read that the signal strength should not be greater than -60dBm (mine was about -10dBm).

The link is only about 50 meters apart and the problem quite simply, as it turns out, that I was blasting the other side with an over amplified signal (amplified by the receptor having a dish too big for the distance).

I hope this helps others, our link is finally running at 300Mbps providing true TCP transfer rates of the maximum the 100Mbps ethernet port can provide… :wink:

set wlan1 tx-power-mode=all-rates-fixed tx-power=0

For 802.11n:

set wlan1 ht-guard-interval=any ht-basic-mcs=mcs-0 ht-supported-mcs=mcs-0,mcs-7,mcs-15
set wlan1 ht-txchains=0,1 ht-rxchains=0,1

NB: Setting MCS doesn’t appear to have any affect when using RouterOS 5.15, the units still slowly climb all the way through all intermediary link speeds before settling on 300Mbps.

NB: Monitoring the WiFi link, after changing settings, will always show a speed of 6.5Mbps. This will only start to climb once the link has traffic to transfer (unlike 802.11a/b/g). This may not be a problem on a bridge link, but a routed link would only see traffic when sent to it. Not sure if this is a bug or simply a from of power saving.

The stats:

                   status: connected-to-ess
                    band: 5ghz-n
               frequency: 5180MHz
       wireless-protocol: nv2
                 tx-rate: 300.0Mbps
                 rx-rate: 300.0Mbps
                    ssid: Syrex_7avenue
                   bssid: 00:0C:42:6C:BC:A5
              radio-name: 27_7
         signal-strength: -45dBm
     signal-strength-ch0: -47dBm
     signal-strength-ch1: -50dBm
      tx-signal-strength: -48dBm
  tx-signal-strength-ch0: -49dBm
  tx-signal-strength-ch1: -52dBm
             noise-floor: -115dBm
         signal-to-noise: 70dB
                  tx-ccq: 100%
                  rx-ccq: 99%
   authenticated-clients: 1
        current-distance: 1
                wds-link: no
                  bridge: no
        routeros-version: 5.15
300 Mbps Full Duplex 100m link - Quest - Solved
2

30db dishes at 50 meters.. Well, that’s tuff..really tuff :slight_smile:
unfortunatelly, for the price of all that equipment of yours, you can get plenty tiny gigabit sxt’s, use a couple of them for your link (the results will definitelly be better, not even
mentioning that flyby birds are going to live) and put the rest for spares :slight_smile:

Nice to hear it’d all worked out for you anyway :wink:

3

Order yourself some attenuators to attenuate your signals on both ends of the link.
By doing this you increase the polar seperation and end up with much better CCQ.