I’ve got a little “side project” for personal use and thought I’d try a couple Mikrotik products to see how well they work and to get a look at RouterOS. Thus far I’m struggling to match what I can do with home user gear.
In a nutshell the premise is to have a couple of security cameras attached to one side of the link and to have an AP setup on the other side of the link that anyone with a computer, tablet or smart phone can use to access the cameras. The goal is for a minimum of 1 KM with the proper antenna and height. This is for open field use so it is a portable solution. This is PURE LOS in the middle of a big open field.
At present I can just get 225 meters from the two Metal 52 ACs which is no better than I was getting with household Asus/Netgear equipment mounted on 5 foot camera tripod stands. I will have 4 solid bars on the link lights on the Metal 52 AC but no usable signal. When I do I have signal it is often 1Mb or less (while actively being used) throughput which isn’t enough. Meanwhile the Asus routers are still in the 20 megabit range on throughput.
I’ve tried a couple different setups (repeater mode, bridge, etc) with almost identical results. I’ve tried all the latest versions of the currently firmware (release, bug-fix, release candidate). As an experiment I’ve forgone the “bridge” and just setup a Meta 52 AC as an AP to check out the distance I can get to a variety of devices including computers and other routers. By the specs I’d think the Mikrotik would smoke the Asus routers in distance but it isn’t so.
ASUS 80 mW = 19dBm + 2dBi antenna = 21 dBm
Mikrotik Metal 52 ac with 1300 mW=31dBm + 6dBi included antenna = 37 dBm
At the proper distance I should see a 16 dBm (or so) improvement per side over the Asus gear but no matter what I do I can’t get a signal from the Metal 52 AC that is better/lower than the Asus. This just seems crazy to me. The Asus is consistently at least 2 to 3 dBm lower using Acrylic or Netstumbler. This is almost a 20 dBm discrepancy in what I think I should see (ideal world).
Thus far I’ve tried setting antenna gain to 0, no country/US/UK/japan/etc and have manually set power to 30dBm/1 watt (tried lots of lower power settings also). I’ve tried setting preamble to both, short and just long. 20 and 20/40 MHz, Auto frequency and manually assigned freqs. I’ve tried Frequency Modes of superchannel and manual-txpower. Nothings seems to improve the range.
Thus far I’ve only played in the 2.4 GHz band since this is what I need to support on the “client side”.
I was originally going to use a couple of Ubiquiti BM2HP bullets or Rocket M2 (600mW/28dBM) devices but figured I have an additional 6 dBm with the Metal 52 ACs (31+31-28-28) which would come in handy since I’m limited on antenna height (portable solution).
Questions:
- If this is a 1300 mW radio how do I set the power to 31dBm? WinBox will only allow up to 30dBm to be entered.
- Why does the tab “Current Tx Power” not show any results? This would be useful info to see if my settings are actually “sticking”.
- Is the included 6dBi antenna crap and the reason for such poor results?
- Is it possible I got 2 bad Metal 52 AC units? (been trying the AP test with both of them one at a time).
- Are there known problems with these units?
- Why are the Metal 52 ACs performing 2 to 3 dBm worse (at any distance) than the Asus even though they have 16 dBm more per side?
Besides the questions just asked does anyone know of any thing else I should set/try? Any/all comments or questions are welcome!!!
I’d really appreciate any feedback.
Carlo
