I have experienced significant problems with the R5H cards. Several have died, some immediately when powering up a new board with them in it. You can smell them burning and see the burn mark in the upper left hand area of the card.
Another problem occurred this week with two of them that were in service for less than a week. I was changing the channels on them and all of a sudden the client on the other end could not connect to them. It happened to cards on two different RB433AH’s.
At this point, I estimate my failure rate at or above 50%, and I have quit deploying them. This is very disappointing, as I had high hopes for them and I saw, via the video at the latest MUM, the MT rep talking about how good they were.
Is anyone else experiencing these problems? If not, any idea on what I am doing to cause it? When I replace them with XR5’s or WLM54ag23’s, everything works fine.
make sure that the antenna is connected to the antenna port, as without the antenna it could burn down. Also do not increase the tx-power of this card.
Some of the immediate burnouts may have been caused by not having an antenna connected. But the majority of them die while in service with default power settings.
I will have to disagree with you there. Other than MT cards, I cannot ever remember having a card burn up because you did not have an antenna plugged into the port. But that problem is a lot less expensive than the one where they just quit working after you change the channel (even when you change it back to the original one it was on). That problem effects users and requires a tower climb.
I am surprised that no one else seems to be experiencing this problem. But, nonetheless, I am going to have to quit using them.
The more power the radio puts out, the greater the need to feed that into an antenna or dummy load. We have seen Ubiquiti XR series radios, Mikrotik radios, EnGenius radios, just about any higher power radio cards regardless of manufacturer go deaf due to not being hooked up to a load for a period of time. No matter what manufacturer you use, this will be an issue on higher power / higher sensitivity cards.
Honestly, even though it’s an almost non existent risk, I wouldn’t have even a low power card on without an antenna hooked up to it. The 10 seconds it takes to attach it to an antenna on the bench just doesn’t make the risk worth it.
I was able to, unfortunetly, reproduce this problem on a R5H + RB433.
I had an XR5 running as AP on 5220 and a R5H connected to it in station-wds.
I changed the channel on the AP to 5320 and everything seemed to be ok.
Two minutes later, I changed the channel on the AP to 5300.
The client R5H connected, stayed online for 5 seconds, and then disconnected, never to be heard from again.
I tried power cycling the client but the routerboard wouldn’t even power on after multiple power cycles of various length. After removing the bad R5H, and replacing with another R5H, everything came back to normal.
In the lab, the bad R5H can hear but can’t transmit in another RB433.
It would be so great if MT GAVE UP on making radios. They just don’t get it. This is taking their BRAND down. Ask Proctor-Gamble, brand is everything and if you take the radio issues away MT has an absolute killer brand. With the radios, they come off as half-… And now to delay getting N working so they can have their own radios? Hmmm Somebody has been reading their own press too much. They aren’t listening to their customers on this. At this point there is no way that we would ever let anyone we work with use MT radios…
Same thing here. I just started using them and 2 out of 4 started smoking in a RB433. The cards were attached to pigtails. Power was left at default settings. It happened when one of the cards was enabled.
we’ve had 2 out of 4 burn up, one immediate, the other after an hour.
I agree that when it comes to radios, MT should focus on supporting Ubiquiti cards…they work for years.
I don’t have a problem with them making cards. The R52’s are a very good card. And for the most part the R52H has been good lately. I definitely believe the R5H’s have some manufacturing problems (could just be some bad assembly runs). So far the good R5H’s that have been deployed work very well (although it is still soon).
And what you think to do MK? Are the staff read posts carefully?
R5H work great, and the price is very adequate.
But the problems with smoke… I loose 50% of R5H, so i calculate that can buy with this money XR5
MK staff what is your solution?
I think, primitive antenna(load) detector can solve the problems
P.S. Some cards was connected to antennas, some cards forget to connect. Some cards start smoke immidiatelly, but some cards after 2-3 monthes of using…
If you think this is a hardware problem, send them for warranty repair and we will investigate the cause. Currently we don’t have any cards with such peculiar problems. Maybe this problem is isolated to one box, or maybe it’s something in your installation
