In our attempt to cover an area of 180 degrees, 400 mt deep, we were advised to purchase an mANTBox 15s (RB921GS-5HPacD) knowing that it would cover only 120 degrees. It turns out that we do miss those 60 degrees after all, and the signal is not as strong as desired. Looking at the MT website, we spotted the OmniTik 5ac with its “omni antenna”. Perhaps we were ill advised and purchased the wrong antenna? OmniTik seems to cover 360 degree, so what is the general business need with mANTBox? Thank you for your comments.
Bump
Omnitik is a decent outdoor (weather proof) AP with mediocre antenna gain: antenna patterns document implies that it’s antenna gain is 0dBi or very similar. It’s vertical pattern is slightly directional (so it does matter how stations are placed around AP vertically) but not so much.
mANTBox 15s, on the other hand, features a very high-gain antenna (as name implies, it’s up to 15dBi), product brochure includes antenna gain patterns which support this. Also beware that mANTBox has quite narrow beam in vertical direction which means you might have to mechanically tilt the antenna to get stations inside main antenna lobe.
Which means: mANTBox will have quite longer range at expense of covering only 1/3 of a full circle. Business case: coverage of “sparsely populated” area (such as camping place / caravan park) with 3 devices, each covering 1/3 of a full circle (together they very well cover full circle).
Whether this resembles your use case it’s up to you to decide. If you need the long range that mANTBox provides, then add another mANTBox with some distance between them, operate it on very different frequency and orient both so that you’ll cover the 180° you need. Just beware that in the overlapping area you won’t be able to control stations about which AP they’ll connect (unless you configure APs with different SSID).
Why, if you use a Connect List, you can distinguish access points by MAC.
Yeah, you can see which station is connected to which AP. You can try to push stations to the other by using ACLs. But you can’t really control them (some stations will freak out when being rejected and won’t even try the other AP). So in best case scenario stations in the overlapping area will distribute equally to both APs, in worst case scenario they will all connect to single AP. The best one can do in this case (with requirement to cover only 180° while two mANTBoxes can decently cover 240°) is to make overlapping area in the high signal part of beam so that stations will get excellent service regardless the AP they connect to.
More information on Omnitik 5 ac can be found here: https://fccid.io/TV7OMNITIKPG5HACD/Test-Report/Test-report-5541349
Well, I agree, this is for the US version of the Omnitik 5 ac.
But MT Omnitik documentation gives the same values for the international version.
Device does not allow to set a lower antenna gain than 8 in ETSI/europe, what is in line with the 7.5 of the Omnitik 5 ac tested.
[admin@Omnitik] > interface wireless
[admin@Omnitik] /interface wireless> set antenna-gain=4
numbers: 0
failure: minimal antenna-gain for this country is 8
[admin@Omnitik] /interface wireless>
.
Also with version ROS 6.49.10, the status info is in line with this (27dBm-8dBi = 19dBm)
I use “station roaming” in the stations when using 802.11, so they take eventually the better one, not the first one that powered up, after a general power failure or reset. Or just the one that was not hit by the power dip, or the one that did not reboot. Otherwise they use to be very sticky there if not kicked out.
With nv2 there is no choice to be made? I Don’t know if this roaming would work. Synchronisation between the nv2 AP would be needed also, if same channels are used.
(Omnitik 5 ac was not rolled out in the field, using 2 SXT SA5 with different channels instead, per distribution point.. With many SXT SA5 in the same area, there are always some common channels)
I don’t mean the Access List on the Access Point, I mean the of Connect List on the Station. With the help of Connect List you can set the order of Access Points to which the Station is connected. With the parameter Allow Signal Out Of Range you can make the Station wait 2 or 5 minutes for a signal from the first Access Point and only if it does not appear during this time it will connect to the second one. If the Connect List is not configured, the station will select the AP with the highest signal.
In the screenshot, the station will connect for 3 minutes to the ROCY SSID with the ROCY security settings and only then connect to the POKO SSID with the POKO security settings.
That’s great if you control stations. But if you don’t (e.g. because stations are customers of a camping place), then this is not an option. It all depends on actual use scenario of @OP (which he didn’t really describe in detail, so we can only guess … and I’m done guessing here 
)
With the parameter Allow Signal Out Of Range you can make the Station wait 2 or 5 minutes for a signal from the first Access Point and only if it does not appear during this time it will connect to the second one.
Excellent , learned something new (for me), using the “Signal Out of Range” in the connect list, to delay the decision to try the next one in the list.
Thanks @Ca6ko