Audience Mesh repeaters not listening on the user facing wifi channels

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Dear community,

Can someone help me with the setup of a mesh of Audience units that cause repeater units to not listen on the user facing wifi channels?

I face the problem of repeater units that don’t listen on the “user facing wifi channels” but just listen on the “backhaul wifi channel”.

Description of the procedure I followed:

  • Tested with both RouterOS 6.49.0 and 7.5.0, I have the same problem.
  • Start the Controller unit and connect to it with an Ethernet Cable on ETH2
  • Connect to Webfig and use the Quick Set “Home Mesh” to setup the Mesh (define the SSID & password…). I also tried using Winbox instead of Webfig and got the same result.
  • Start each repeater unit pairing them to the controller unit pressing on the “WPS Sync” button and verify that the pairing is successful checking that the LED turns green not blinking

State of my mesh after the pairing

  • The controller unit has a green-not-blinking LED and listens on the 3 wifi channels and its : the 2 user facing channels with the desired SSID and the backhaul channel
  • The repeater units has a green-not-blinking LED BUT only listen on the backhaul wifi channel (SSID “SYNC-***”) , they don’t listen on the user facing wifi channels

Further investigation using Winbox showed me that:

  • Repeater units
  • Are connectable with Winbox on their Mac address on ETH2 with the default login/password but they don’t have an IP address
    • Have wlan1 and wlan2 disabled / greyed
    • Have wlan3 enabled (the backhaul channel) in mode Station Bridge and Winbox reports a virtual wlan4 in mode AP Bridge (I don’t know what a virtual wireless interface is, I’m not very knowledgeable on networking)
    • Don’t report any “Remote CAP” in the CapsMan screens
    • Don’t report a Mesh configured
  • Controller unit
  • Don’t report any “Remote CAP” in the CapsMan screens
  • Don’t report a Mesh configured

Screenshots


Audience Mesh Repeater
repeater-wireless.png
repeater-capsman-remote-cap.png
repeater-mesh.png
Audience Mesh Controller
mesh_controller_18-FD-74-6A-A5-1C.png

2

Did you successfully solve the problem? Is there any information from Mikrotik technical support?

3

Hello, I just received the last bits of help from Mikrotik support and my repeater units seem to work now.

I seem to have faced several distinct problems:

  • The “reset” button was not working
    • The workaround was to connect my laptop on ETH2 and use Winbox, usually with a mac address connection because no IP was assigned, and reset the Audience unit through Windbox
  • After resetting to factory settings, the units weren’t actually reset to the settings in place when you unbox the device, it listened on 2 “user facing” generated SSID (“Mikrotik{{randomId}}-2” and “Mikrotik{{randomId}}-5”) with a generated wifi password
  • The workaround to properly configure the controller was to:
    • Connect a laptop on ETH2 and use Winbox to configure the following:
    • DON’T use QuickSet “Home Mesh”, it doesn’t seem to be suited for Audience networks
    • Use CapsMan change the generated SSID and wifi password
    • Open a terminal in Winbox and execute
/interface bridge port add bridge=bridge interface=wlan3
  • There pairing of the Audience repeaters using the “WPS Sync” button was incomplete: the repeater
    displayed a solid green LED suggesting pairing was done but were only listening on the backhaul wifi channel and didn’t assign an IP to devices connected on ETH1 and ETH2. The work around was
    • connect a laptop to the Audience repeater on ETH1 or ETH2 to open Winbox on a mac address connection (the IP was not assigned)
    • Open a Winbox Terminal and execute:
interface/bridge/port add bridge=bridge1 interface=ether1
interface/bridge/port add bridge=bridge1 interface=ether2 
interface/wireless/cap set interfaces=wlan1,wlan2 bridge=bridge1 discovery-interfaces=bridge1 enabled=yes
  • set caps-man-addresses to the LAN IP of the controller unit (by default 192.168.88.1) in Winbox navigating through interface/wireless/cap
  • Reboot the repeater unit
    It seems that Mikrotik identified a “malfunction” in the software so I guess they will ship a fix.

I hope this was clear and this will help other Audience customers.

4

Thank you very much for the information. It helped me a lot:)

In my case, it was enough to add wlan3 to Bridge in “Controller” and not to use QuickSet option “Home Mesh”.
On the other devices I did not have to make any changes. Just connect to the network by starting the device with the WPS button pressed.

I did the configuration on version 6.49.6 and 7.5.