wow - i have hundreds of various RBs, but this is the first time I see the advanced option, I thought detail was for this.. thanks bpwl, man never stops learning
I use antenna-gain exactly as many people mentioned here and that is why I miss it, some of our APs move frequently and if I see bad wireless conditions / interference etc on the spot, I just lower power by setting antenna-gain, without bothering about different powers, changing country regulations etc - very fast and comfortable, and I remember the default antenna-gain values for most of our routers
bring back the antenna-gain feature within GUI on future releases.. Let MikroTik OS calculate proper TX and regulatory EIRP settings… Mucking with all-card-rates-fixed is not the answer.
Yes, exactly that. Since it knows the gain of the integrated antenna it uses a hard coded value instead of being set from user input. So if you have any device with integrated antenna, there is no good way to reduce TX power.
Reason is probably FCC or other similar regulator spotted “antenna gain” to be adjustable in one of the Mikrotik boxes with internal antennas and went full “YOU CAN’T LET USERS DO THAT!!!” and so Mikrotik removed/hidden it from GUI.
I’m fine with that, as long as there is new feature with same functionality of lowering power evenly.
Hey, Mikrotik, if you are listening, just make something like this:
Under TX power, add new Tx power mode, call it something like “lower power for all rates” or “decrease power evenly” or whatever you want to call it, and let us enter the value there.
As long as it works the same way (ie. adjusts power down evenly for all modulations) I’d be perfectly happy with it.
And NO, “all rates fixed” is definitely NOT what we need or even usable in our cases, as described above.
Yes, what r00t says is what is being considered.
Also yes to the other posters above, it was removed from user input, because “antenna gain” is a hard parameter of the antenna itself. Adjusting it makes no sense, if antenna is non removable.
Radio doesn’t know the difference between antennae, only your friendly local RF inspector does.
The problem with unrestricted antenna gain settings is that it is possible to set it lower than actual value and the resulting EIRP is higher than allowed. So hardcoding antenna gain for “permanently attached” antennae is the correct way of doing it, the only problem is the resulting awkwardness of the way to reduce Tx power. Hopefully MT will come up with some great idea how to do it and with even better name for the new setting.
So hardcoding antenna gain for “permanently attached” antennae is the correct way of doing it,
Actually the “minimum antenna gain” is hard coded when regulatory domain is used for built-in antenna. So hiding this from the GUI was not really needed to be compliant. with RF certification.
But it is/was very confusing for novice users that setting the antenna gain was not altering the antenna gain, as intuitively expected from the wording, but telling RouterOS to take that amount of antenna gain into account.
Short wording is difficult, but should express something like: “TX Power reduction compensating for antenna gain”.
Still the need to give a higher number to further reduce the transmit power can be contra-intuitive, and that minimum should be visible somewhere then.
I hope they find a way out of this. I’m not the only one who holds all his AP functioning devices in the 6.45.x version. They all have specific antenna-gain setting by tuning iterations.
I would like to repeat the main issue with this. Antenna gain is a fixed physical parameter of an antenna. Like weight. If antenna is fixed and permanently attached, why would you need to edit this value?
The field needs to be edited only if the system doesn’t know what antenna you have attached.
If you need to lower transmit power, there are / will be other ways to correctly do it.
We know what it means and what it does, adjusting TX Power by that amount to comply to the regulatory-domain limits for the country set.
Its long definition in the case above would be: “antenna-gain=substract this amount from the maximum EIRP of the country set and use the result for TX Power.” or something like that.
We also know that a setting can’t make the internal antennas from our hAP ac2s for example, bigger or smaller, and adjusting that value thinking that this would be the result is pointless, BUT:
We also said for what we were actualy using that setting for, except the obvious stated above, it was an easy way to reduce TX Power even more without much headache, and that’s what we want to be able to do in the future also without much headache.
We know that it wasn’t meant to be used that way, but it served for that purpose very well.
We’ll wait for the new implementation of a similar setting with a new name or whatever, to be able to do exactly that.
Thank you for listening to us!
The mode all-rates fixed, however misleading its name, never transmits with power higher than cablibrated for compliance. You should be using this mode to reduce the power.
Examples of what happens with different approaches:
if you will set antenna-gain=1, tx-power=default:
actual tx power mcs0=18dbm (regulatory - antenna-gain), mcs7=16dbm
if you will set antenna-gain=0, tx-power=18:
actual tx power mcs0=18dbm, mcs7=16dbm
if you will set antenna-gain=5, txpower=default:
actual tx power mcs0=14dbm, mcs7=14dbm
For each modulation, the minimum of 3 values is used as “tx power”: 1 - regulatory limit minus antenna gain, 2 - configured tx power in all-rates-fixed mode, 3 - calibrated power for modulation.
not true - too low values threw errors, something like “minimal antenna gain for this country is xx” . So it was checking antenna gain value vs EIRP/country
MKT,Normis, trying to justify what they did. Removing a parameter called “antenna gain” from the GUI.
“Antenna gain is a fixed physical parameter of an antenna.” Yes it is and that is baked into hardware (the physical structure of the antenna).
The parameter called “antenna gain” is a parameter that can be set. It is not physical at all, it is not related to the physical antenna in any way. It does not adjust the working characteristics of the antenna. It is just a variable used in calculating and setting the TX Power of the radio. Unfortunately it bears the same name, ( what leads to a lot of confusion, ) because the value must be equal or larger than the physical antenna gain to be compliant with regulation. That simple compliance test is in place already for a long time. Removing that parameter from the GUI is not helping to enforce this compliance.
Once again, MT showing off their ability to ignore users or understand uses or understand wifi terminology they use.
Why they have not hired bpwl to clean up their wifi mess is inexcusable.
Impeach the bloody lot of them
Did I say Bpwl make MT Wifi Great Again LOL.
Whatever is decided I want to be able to reduce maximum allowable output in decibels (single digits).
Since we are talking fixed internal antenna units, it should be
A. TX power reduction by rate selections
B. TX power reduction across all rate selections (as stated above).
(in most consumer routers one can select the TX power in decibels up to the max available for that unit)
I really dont care how its done but the wording above is not ambiguous or confusing.
As a user I expect the default to be max power and then I can lower it to suit my needs.
Maybe some people are not able to think they could do something contra-productive, just by refusing to undo it , they think they are right, even if many people ask for it.to be undone.
That “antenna gain” parameter (not the antenna gain physical characteristic) is a relative power adjustment. The TX Power setting is an absolute power adjustment. An absolute setting cannot just replace a relative setting in many many systems.
Even the cheap devices from Edimax, TP-link, D-link, Engenius, Draytek, … let’s say all equipment I have ever seen has a possible relative setting.
Advantage of this parameter is also it is giving at least a (very) little feedback in the ‘status’ line of the interface.: 5220/20-Ce/ac/P(21dBm) , while the “Current TX Power” is empty. I know that “Current TX Power” used to come from the wireless chip and is not there with the newer chips. But that’s no reason to take away ALL information from the operator.
Do we have to do the math ourselves every time ? regulatory domain, set antenna gain (which is hidden from the gui and from the default export or print) , TX power set, calibrated power .
Default CAP configuration implements 2dbi gain automatically, after configuration reset and standard configuration being implemented after the reset.
Another mikrotik drawback. Before it was easy to cope with all CAPsMAN glitches and bugs, by simply resetting CAPs - at least in my case, since I don’t need any kind of advanced set-up for CAPs.
Now I have to deal with antenna-gain=2 set, every time.
That’s just awfull.
