OS 2.8 and ar5212

RouterOS General
1

ar5212 mini-pci cards in routerboard with 4 minipci slots.

1 watt amp and a long run up of cable up a tower (50 metres).


So we have 40 clients (including other access points) off of it and whats happenning is two problems

  • apparently spontaneous, a few customers the clients drop off , until the interface is stopped and restarted N times, until it works again

  • if i make a change to the interface, then it sometimes goes into a few different modes

  • a few customers drop off and rx signal strength appears lower for the rest
  • a lot of customers drop off
  • its mostly dead.

So the way I’ve fixed it is to just bang it off and on again (set tx power, unset tx power, set tx power to 23, to 20 , etc) until it works

I’ve tried

  • replace amplifier
  • replace card (twice)
  • replace flylead (once)

I have not replaced antenna… I can’t climb that high

2

Power consumption (can the PSU/regulators do this)?
Heat (measure) ?

… just 2 things that sprung to mind

Regards

3

Numerous times on this forum you can read that Amps are not recommended, they amplify noise and it becomes even worse than without the amp.

4

it is most likely the cards not MT that is causing the issue. MT really needs to find a better wireless solution for there product line. MT works well but for some reason the 5200 series cards are kinda flaky or work well one time and not the next.

and again this being your business looks bad on you as far as your customer(s) they think your system is not reliable and they just may
change to cable or dsl because of it .

amps do add noise to the system , but if they are good amps . like Rflinks then they should help the system perform better ,not worse . again this reality if everybody played fair and kept there radio systems clean, good antennas etc. we would not need to add amps. but that just isnt the case

what type of amp are you using?

if it is not RFlinks junk it , i have found over the years there amps blow 80
% of the other guys out of the water

Randy

5

btw the only reason i posted a q&a about trango is i have serval links that work and am having issues with MT ( again it not there fault as much as it is the CM9 cards fault . i have 5 old pcmcia silver cards running on a couple of links and they work fine . just want to move most of our old Karlnet stuff the MT but am worried about the intermitent lockups and radio performance. . and if you read the posts you would know i was asking for a solution so i dont have to use Trango or airaya radio gear.
also there is a big issue with ping response comparing the MT with a CM9 and a trango. and this is where my questions were directed. i have a multi hop set of trango radios 1st hop p2p 12miles ,2nd hop p2p running 6miles,3rd hop runnig 3.6miles and i can push 9.7mb thru put tcp (ftp traffic ) all the way thru with a 3-5ms response to the end user.

i have tried this with the CM9 on my MT test systems and i am lucky to get 5mb of thruput and 30-500 ms response time .. this is using the same antenna links ,just unpluging my trango gear and pluging my mt gear into the links.

again this is not a bash on MT i want a solution . MT rocks but and i seem to be complainine alot but it not without merit. i just wish we had a better wireless solutioin for the MT product line .

MT support i am hopping is working on this issue.

i am hoping that the new 400mw radios work better .


Randy