I am in the process of migrating a number of LocustWorld MeshBoxes to MikroTik. The existing wireless cards are Senao 2511 Prism 2.5 based, they work fine with LocustWorld where they have a dual role of both Mesh and AP.
When I install RouterOS v2.9.41 the 2511 cards work as AP or Mesh (WDS in RouterOS), but not both simultaneously.
I have set wlan1 as WDS mode and then tried to add one or more virtual APs, clients can see the SSID for the wlan1 interface, but cannot see the virtual APs. Is this a limitation of the 2511 cards, if so why does RouterOS allow me to configure unsupported options?
If I replace the 2511 with a CM9 the virtual APs work, but I have some very flakey connections with clients that were working perfectly with the LocustWorld software.
Just to emphasise, the only thing that has changed is the software and wireless card, all other factors are unchanged.
Incidentally I’ve just gone through a horrendous two weeks pulling my hair out trying to get Senao 8602 (AR5413) cards to work, I finally ditched them for the CM9 cards which are better, but nowhere as good as my old 2511 cards.
I suspect that the CM9 cards being a/b/g do not have as good band pass filtering and are somehow being affected by 5.8GHz “noise” from a number of Alvarion BreezeAccess VL units in the area.
I have also tried the CM9 cards in B/G mode to try and get better throughput on WDS between MikroTik routers, but this just seems to upset my B only clients on the virtual APs.
Looks like I’m going to have to go down the mutiple wireless route. This is a pain as the existing MeshBox routers are MiniITX based and only have a single PCI slot, I guess I’ll have to invest in some 2 or 4 slot miniPCI/PCI cards.
Ideally I’d like to continue to use the 2511 cards, but with virtual APs working.
As I’m new to MikroTik RouterOS any guidance would be appreciated.
Regards
Chris Macneill
Glenkens Broadband Ltd / Edcuated Guesswork Ltd.