LHG 5 wireless link - Test report

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Out in the deep forests of northern Sweden, fiber Internet connections is not available to everybody and ADSL is terribly slow upstream. Therefore a friend of mine decided he wanted to try to share his Internet connection with another friend through a wireless bridge. Unfortunately they do not have a free line of sight between them, but they both have to a nearby mountain.
I had two LHG 5 to test with. We asked a colleague who lives close to the mountain if we could possibly mount one of the antennas on the roof of his house, but he had something better. An old watchtower about 10-15 meters high!

The view is not too bad either

On the other end we had free sight to the AP (it’s close to the mountains).

And just by holding the client in about the right direction we got a good signal.

We decided to go with a more professional mount though…

Here is a screen shot from the UBNT link planner (I’m sorry about that but I don’t think Mikrotik has a similar tool). Conditions are very good as you can see. Distance is 19 km.

And the results were indeed good!
Ping between a PC at each end was about 3-4 ms. Throughput between the LHG:s was about 70-80 Mbps (UDP, one direction).

Unfortunately I do not have free line of sight to the tower.

I have however a friend with a fiber connection on a hill much closer.

There are a few trees at my end, but if I just mount the LHG high enough it should work.

Just thought someone would be interested.

2

Love this ! … now you’ve got me thinking !

3

Yes, it is kind of too good to be true.

I should probably add that the LHG ships with RouterOS License level 3, to the AP has to be upgraded to level 4. Not a big deal though.
Here comes three screenshots from the LHG at the AP (tower) side:

4

You should make a how to post for us “hobbyists” :slight_smile:

5

Well, if there is interest I could make a guide for this particular setup.
On the other hand, there is possibly plenty of them out there already.

6

You can make a PtP connection with the L3 license on both devices.
Bridging Networks with SXT

7

Nice.
I did not actually know that. If a simple PTP bridge is desired, then this seems like a good solution!

8

Good day! Can i see your config file LHG (server and client)for this wifi bridge ?

9

Hi

At both AP and client

  • Disable/remove all firewall and NAT rules
/ip firewall filter disable x

(where x is the ID if the filter)

/ip firewall nat disable x

(where x is the ID of the NAT rule)

  • Disable connection tracking
/ip firewall connection tracking set enabled=no
  • Disable DHCP client on WLAN
/ip dhcp-client disable 0
  • Disable DHCP server on LAN
/ip dhcp-server disable 0
  • Change address on ether1 port (default is 192.168.88.1, and it has to be changed on at least one of the devices)
/ip address
add address=192.168.88.2/24 interface=ether1 network=192.168.88.0
  • Create a bridge and add both ether1 and wlan1 to it
/interface bridge
add name=bridge1
/interface bridge port
add bridge=bridge1 interface=ether1
add bridge=bridge1 interface=wlan1

At AP

  • Configure wlan1 interface as AP-bridge. I use the MIkrotik NV2 protocol instead of standard 802.11 because I find it a lot better for this purpose.
    interface wireless. The WDS dynamic mode enables me to connect several clients transparently to this AP. Each client gets its own “virtual” WDS interface dynamically created at this AP when they connect. The WDS interface is automatically added to the bridge selected under parameter wds-default-bridge (so it is probably not necessary to add wlan1 interface to it as above…).
    Keep in mind to set your SSID (MY_SSID) and preshared key (MY_PRESHARED_KEY). It is also probably a good idea to mention that security profiles used with the standard 802.11 protocol (WPA, WPA2 etc) are ignored when running NV2.
set [ find default-name=wlan1 ] band=5ghz-onlyn channel-width=20/40mhz-Ce \
    disabled=no distance=indoors mode=ap-bridge nv2-cell-radius=10 \
    nv2-preshared-key=[i]MY_PRESHARED_KEY[/i] nv2-security=enabled ssid=[i]MY_SSID[/i] \
    tdma-period-size=3 wds-default-bridge=bridge1 wds-mode=dynamic \
    wireless-protocol=nv2

At client
Configure the wlan1 interface as station-WDS.
/interface wireless
set [ find default-name=wlan1 ] band=5ghz-onlyn channel-width=20/40mhz-Ce disabled=no frequency=auto
mode=station-wds nv2-preshared-key=MY_PRESHARED_KEY nv2-security=enabled ssid=MY_SSID
wds-default-bridge=bridge1 wds-mode=dynamic wireless-protocol=nv2

Voila! The client should now be able to connect.
Check the connection state:

/interface wireless registration print

On the client (station) side, one connection should be listed. On the AP side, each connected client gets its own row:

# INTERFACE             RADIO-NAME       MAC-ADDRESS       AP  SIGNAL... TX-RATE
 0 wlan1                 E48D8Cxxxxxx     E4:8D:8C:xx:xx:xx no  -69dBm    162M...

I am no expert in this, so there are probably improvements to make, but this works well.
I work in an industry and there I am using RB951G-2HnD for the same purpose (transparently replacing ethernet cables). There I have at least 10 clients for each AP and the links are incredibly stable under conditions which are far from optimal. Throughput is however not a priority there. If it was, I would definitely have to put some more effort into it, it enables machine to connect to SQL databases etc without problems.

At home I use it as a bridge (with an OmtiTik as AP) to a neighbour house. On top of this configuration there are also a couple of VLAN trunks, and it works flawlessly so far.

10

Great posts, thanks for sharing :slight_smile: Love your results.

I see you used Bandwidth Test from the router to determine the speed. This will load the CPU and affect the result. Try to download something from your PC, with torrent or something like that. See what you get then.

11

Hi

We can do that later. The link is currently not up and running, since I “borrowed” the LHG:s from another setup. New ones are on the way. We will do the tests then.

12

So, short follow up on this link.

We have been running this setup now since mid Sept 2016 with every possible weather conditions commonly found in these northen lands.
There is two LHG’s in the tower. One pointing to the location of the fibre connection and the other to the client, approx. 40deg from the uplink.

This is absolutley brilliant!

After the initial tweaking and setup to maximize thoughput we get around 80-97MBits to Speedtest from the client.
Not one time have I had to go to the bridge location to for maintenance!

And with the price for these LHG’s I can’t say anything other than WOW!

Looking forward for an “upgraded” LHG with maybe AC and a few more chains? :slight_smile:

13

Need lhg5 with gigabit lan


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

14

Here is our link with LHG5

Distance 27KM
Dis.jpg
Signal
Sig.jpg
Btest
btest.jpg