I am using the hAP ac3 as a router and want to add a second access point in my living room.
Currently, only audience has a rich specification (4x4 MIMO 802.11ac Wave 2, 802.11a/b/g, 802.11n, 802.11ac) and looks good despite its the 4.5 dBi antennas.
Does ROS 7 allow me to fully use its potential as a 4x4 MU-MIMO Wave2 access point with a dual-port 802.1Q switch and do the drivers fully support QCA9984?
I have an Audience serving as a WAP on only.
Installed routerOS7. Added the wifi Wave 2 drivers. Defaulted the unit to no configuration.
Added everything to bridge.
Added a DHCP client.
Configured all 3 radios.
Best wifi serving client performance I have ever seen, from Mikrotik.
It’s about equal to WAPs I used in 2016… Ut you loose a lot of Mikrotik features/functionality when you use the WAVE2 drivers.
Thank you for sharing your experience.
Order has been shipped.
Have you ever used ac3?
I have one of those too.
Configured it the same way. Well 2 radios vs 3.
Great, so you have experience with both of them!
Which one has better range and stability?
My goal is to upgrade to the 80 MHz channel.
I am using the Audience. The hAP AC3 is sitting in it’s box.
I found the 4x4 set to 149 @ 80mhz seems to perform the best.
In terms of configuration as an Access Point/Switch
See item D - https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=182373
Can i get some help here howto configure the radios for best performance?
Updated to latest 7.1.4, added wifi wave 2 package, dhcp client on bridge and added all ports to bridge. Now im unsure how to configure all 3 radios. What channel, what band, what width for all 3 of them? Which security to use? WPA2 and/or 3 ?
That depends on what you need… what are the three default chains 1x2.4 and 2x5 ?
By the way that does not limit you to 3 WLANS, you can create virtual WLANs that will run off the same master radio.
So you could have 2 of each 3 of each 4 of each etc… although I wouldnt go past 3 each myself.
Depends on how many WLANS you need.
As for frequencies, no spoons here, go look up the WIFI radio frequency spectrum allocation for the country you live in and see what is available and then space out the 5ghz WLANS appropriately. As for 2ghz common practice is 1-6-11 for channel spacing.
I believe WPA3 only works with WPA3 devices but the standard is backwards compatible with WPA2 so that it can work with older devices.
If true then see no reason why not to set to WPA3… and let the device figure it out…
I tend to be conservative and go only up to 20Mhz for 2.4gig and 40Mhz for 5gig but perhaps for the audience with less MT guts and more standard wifi guts, the 80Mhz is now palatable.
Well looking for “best setup”. Just unboxed this at work, but a standard config with just a crypto key and set wpa 2 and 3 psk. Nothing else. Then same configuration on all 3 radios with Sweden as country. Over 500 mbps both up n down on phone. We have 1000mbit WAN connection
Nice but acting as AP and not a router correct?
How many LANs or subnets involved, just one??
With WifiWave2 or the standard package? If your using wifiwave2, it’s very particular on the settings. Annoyingly it will take bad ones, and then give show “invalid channel” in the interface list. What you may be running into is the 2nd 5Ghz Wi-Fi (the “mesh” one) has 4 chains, while the 1st 5Ghz one has 2 chains. Obviously more chains mean theoretically higher channel width. So you likely just need to use different channels specs on the different Wi-Fi interfaces, instead of it inheriting the parent configuration.
But at the end of the day, you RF environment is going to dictate the max speed. But to get the highest speeds you’ll want to the 5Ghz interface with the 4 chains on the audience.
@anav, dunno if you’ve played with wifiwave2 BUT all configuration is like CAPsMAN with the profiles/configuration/etc. So it’s not quite as straightforward word on the channel/width stuff… A “configuration” gets applied to an wifiwave2 interface, so you only know if something isn’t compatibility after you’ve hit “OK” and the whole interface goes invalid. And, on the Audience there are 2 x 5Ghz antennas, and one is better than the other. But the better one comes up disabled since it’s not compatible with the default wifi configuration profile MT installs with wifiwave2…
Anyway the wifiwave2 may be where he’s having trouble…
i have an Audience operating in AP with Ros 6.48.6
i use 4x4 radio at 5500mhz/160mhz Ceeeeeee for Laptops supporting 160mhz (intel 9260 and intel ax210), 2x2 5ghz radio and 2x2 2,4ghz radio for other devices
works well, the only caveat is radar detection on 5500mhz takes 10 minutes after reboot or any change on wlan3
i have not tried ros7 and/or wave2 on this device, you are encouraging me to do it 
The second wifi can be much better choice for main WLAN: it has 4 chains and operates above 5.5FHz which means possibility for 160MHz channel and in ETSI countries higher allowed Tx power (30dBm vs. 23dBm). The price to be paid is that most of band covered is DFS which in best case means delayed start and in worst case it doesn’t work altogether. In my case (rural area far away from all radars) it’s the best case 
The ROS defaults (I’m not sure about default config defaults though) on 5GHz are pretty sane though: 80MHz channel width. One can not affect channel layout (so it’s XXXX at all times with tendency to select Ceee). On 2GHz default is 40MHz which I don’t like that much (even though I don’t see more than 3-5 neighbours at any time).
One can set AP with security.authentication-types=wpa2-psk,wpa3-psk and security.encryption=ccmp,gcmp,ccmp-256,gcmp-256 for maximum flexibility. Just leave group-encryption unset (default is ccmp) … all but most advanced clients don’t support newer ciphers and this setting is not just about multicasts (as help page implies), it’s broadcasts as well …
I’ve run into a weird glitch about wifi and VLANs … I should probably netinstall device and re-do the configuration to make it go away. I did try to netinstall, but I didn’t bother to verify how long I was supposed to be pushing the button. I got as far as reset to no defaults which was enough for me 
Thank you for all replies so far! Im on ROS 7.1.4 with wifi wave 2 package. Its supposed to serve my WLAN at home so just one subnet involved and the main router is RB3011. I will power it via an RB260GSP with PoE.
Im pretty unsure i have correct setup?
wifi1 has band 2GHz N, 20Mhz width with channel 2412
wifi2 has band 5GHz AC, 20MHz width with channel 5180
Cant get wifi3 to work proper. I tried here with 5GHz AC, 20/40/80/160MHz and channel 5745. It says DFS channel availible only. Was looking here for accepted channels in Sweden: https://www.nowire.se/kanaler-och-frekvenser-for-5-ghz/ and as I understand 5745 is accepted here? But it wont select that channel.
I use same security config for all 3 interface and have only set passphrase and using WPA2 PSK and WPA3 PSK.
Normally, when I setup router/accesspoints for friends I use Capsman and wAP AC and in the caps conf I use to have the same SSID for both 2.4 and 5GHz and let the client choose. Works good. Can I use it here too? Might not work and the devices that have compatible hardware for using the the 4 chain interface maybe wont select that? How should i set this? Maybe same SSID for wifi2 and 2 and a separate for wifi3 so i get use of the speed of that interface?
Setup is a bit confusing since its a bit different than on ROS6 and im a bit unsure here!
EDIT:
After 10 mins the wifi3 interface did choose channel 5500, dunno why?
Speed is really good but can be better?! Here’s a test on an iPhone12 on wifi3 interface:
I spit out my coffee reading the last line. I am NEVER sure when configuring the MT device.
I blame it on Sob who has instilled great insecurity into my configuring prowess!
Most on the forum be surprised you got >100Mb/s from any Mikrotik device. In fact, I would have attributed @anav’s
to your decent speedtest results…
I’ve never tried to use 80Mhz or more with Wi-Fi. But with the wifiwave2 “less is more” is the best configuration model. So in Channels, you should only have “Sweden” selected in your case.
Once you start selecting a channel, you have to specify more I think and it has to match what’s available on the chipset exactly. And I can’t recall but you may have to specify the channel range, not just a center frequency. And, not sure winbox helps you get it right, so if you do want to play with the setting more, I’d recommend using the CLI under /interfaace/wifiwave2. There you can see the available choices when doing a “set”, since they support “tab completion”.
So I suspect the “mesh”/4ch wifi interface will work if you remove the channel selection, and leave everything but the country as empty/not configured. Maybe use a different ssid name on it, so you can compare.
It’s possible to configure the channels etc., but it’s just not automatic or easy with wifiwave2.
I did some tests with a couple Audiences a while back, I have the configuration I used here: http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/using-wifiwave2-to-bridge-two-audience-wirelessly-thoughts-4-address-mode/153357/1
Apparently I was using “skip DFS” – more interested in stability than max speed so why risk a DFS event (or bug). Why I wouldn’t like have gotten any >80Mhz.
ROS v7 says your chosen frequency/channel is not available in Sweden:
/interface/wifiwave2/info> country-info Sweden
2.4ghz: 2412 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2417 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2422 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2427 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2432 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2437 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2442 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2447 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2452 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2457 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2462 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2467 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
2472 MHz 20/40mhz 20 dBm
5ghz: 5180 MHz 20/40/80mhz 23 dBm indoor
5200 MHz 20/40/80mhz 23 dBm indoor
5220 MHz 20/40/80mhz 23 dBm indoor
5240 MHz 20/40/80mhz 23 dBm indoor
5260 MHz 20/40/80mhz 23 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min) indoor
5280 MHz 20/40/80mhz 23 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min) indoor
5300 MHz 20/40/80mhz 23 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min) indoor
5320 MHz 20/40/80mhz 23 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min) indoor
5500 MHz 20/40/80/160mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min)
5520 MHz 20/40/80/160mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min)
5540 MHz 20/40/80/160mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min)
5560 MHz 20/40/80/160mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min)
5580 MHz 20/40/80/160mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min)
5600 MHz 20/40/80/160mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 10 min)
5620 MHz 20/40/80/160mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 10 min)
5640 MHz 20/40/80/160mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 10 min)
5660 MHz 20/40mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min)
5680 MHz 20/40mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min)
5700 MHz 20mhz 30 dBm DFS (CAC 1 min)
As you can see, the list goes only up to 5700MHz (channel 140).
So there’s only space for one single 160MHz channel between 5490 and 5650 MHz (channel frequencies are centre frequencies for 20MHz channels) and ROS v7 seems to prefer Ceeeeeee channel layout, hence 5500 as frequency shown in ROS.
Wikipedia has a rather extensive, very complete, table of 5GHz WiFi channels and layouts, makes one understand a few bits.