Hi guys
I have a 433 board with three wireless cards, i want to use the cards to setup Access point such that each card carried a 120degree sectoral antenna and all the cards should be in the same frequency and use the same ssid.
I mean three cards on the same board running AP and same ssid and frequency?
How do I go about it.?
Configure all 3 radio cards as mode = AP-bridge. Let’s call the 3 cards wlan1, wlan2, wlan3.
Set the freq and SSID as required on each card.
Create a bridge.
Add wlan1, wlan2, wlan3 as ports on the bridge.
Give the bridge an IP address. Do NOT give each of the interfaces an IP address.
This is not an application for WDS. WDS is used to connect AP’s on different nodes across a wireless link. All of your AP’s are on the same node, so you just bridge them internally.
Your single board will now have 3 AP’s all bridged together as one.
If you are building a hotspot, tell the hotspot to use interface = bridge1 (assuming your bridge was given the usual default name of bridge1).
BTW, why do you want the frequency the same on all 3 antennas? If you are trying to help clients with roaming, most clients won’t have any problems switching frequency to the strongest signal.
I think you will get better performance and avoid interference between antennas if you chose a different freq for each one.
My reasons for the same frequency are
- I want to use sectorial actenna to improve signal strenght without requiring any input from the users.
- The are so many AP’s around here on diffrent frequencies and I only have two frequencies for my installations.
With the setup you gave me, that means I will consume 3 different channels
I only have two channels for use and I’m planning to have two AP’s with three sectorial antenna configuration
I have tried using a splitter (to connect the 3antennas to a single card) but only discover that the splitter are even dropping the signal the more.
In my suggested setup, the choice of channels is up to you. You can configure all 3 radio cards to use the same channel and the same SSID.
I do this myself in some situations. It will not work as well as using 3 different channels, but it is better than using a single radio card and a splitter, which I have also tried.
I have a similar situation and qould like to know if I use the same SSID will the clients auto-roam between bridged wlans on the hotspot?
What happens if I use different SSIDs will auto-roam fail?
Thanx for reply..
The behavior of the clients when switching between bridged AP’s depends on the client.
If you use the same SSID, the switchover is usually transparent and the client will just pause briefly but not lose its session.
If you use different SSID’s, it might be transparent to the client and it might not.
In our network, we always use the same SSID on all of our AP’s to make things easy for the customers to remember.