We’ve got signal strength readings anywhere from -28 to -74 as shown by the MT AP 2.8.17.
Obviously the lower (-28) the better. But is there a known range that I should be targeting? In other words, when can the signal be too low (overpowering the AP) and when is it too high for it to be a solid connection?
All of our clients are set to 11Mbps only and so is the MT AP.
Thanks!
I’m still looking for any comments on this.
Anyone out there have a 2.4Ghz MT AP deployment that would like to compare experiences with signal strength?
We have since upgraded to 2.8.21 on these AP’s. Nothing really changed with the upgrade though.
We have some aps on 2,4. we have -50 - -88 ss, and have many problems with clients frequently disc/reconnect ot the ap. Strange, but its not connection with signal strenght. we have -85 ss client up for hundreds of hours, and have a -64 client disconnects every 30 minutes. Yes, its about noise maybe. But the disconnects are usually is onyl for 1-2 sec. So I will try to upgrade to 2.8.19 or 2.8.21 to see if it is better. i read something about it in cangelog. Does anyone see any difference in link stabilitiy (2.8.10 is currently used).
I do not know about the MikroTik wireless cards, but with some other equipment we have had we saw some trends that might give you a rule of thumb.
Anything worse than -85 signal, and we began to see issues, even if there was no noise. The receiver sensitivity will have a lot to do with this, and you can generally find what is published for the radio card you are using.
The other thing was the signal to noise ratio.
If we had -50 signal, which is great, but -55 noise, we could never do anything. The gap there is 5. Anything below 10 and we just started losing packets no matter what we did.
Again, this is equipment specific, but it might give you some very general numbers to look at.
We changed from horizontal to vertical at a lot of locations because of this. While our signal stayed the same, or in some cases dropped a little, we generally had a 10 to 30 drop on the noise across the range of clients.
That meant our ones with a 5 or 6 gap on the noise suddenly had at least a 15. Many times they got even more than that. And once the ratio was wider, they got great throughput.
Most of my clients end up between -62 and -76 at the tower, and I have 2 connections within 500 ft of my tower gets a -55 and a -57… My worst one (between -76 and -84) is just a CB3 with the stock antenna in a 7th floor window pointing in the wrong direction (lucky bounce I think).
I have always heard not to do any lower than -55 (at the AP) and don’t do any higher than -75 on either end. Of course we have a few customers with -79 and one with -85 that have very few problems but do have some packetloss here and there. Doesn’t affect basic web surfers. Would be interesting to see what others think.
Maybe the ideal value is -40. At lower absolute values (-30 for example) the link has lower performance. At bigger (-60) - the same. The “ideal” range is between -40 to -55 for me.