I use a RB912UAG-2HPnD-OUT with 2 omni-directional 8dBi antennas on a wall outside the house. It’s a very cool machine. Now I have wifi in a 200 meters larger area.
But I don’t need such a strong signal. I only need it strong and solid for about 50 meters for 2 neighbors. Inside the house all devices are now connecting to the routerboard because its signal is stronger than the one of my router inside the house. The routerboard is connected to the LAN via Powerline which is a little slower than the internet connection. I’d like to get all devices inside the house connected to my router and all outside the house connected to the routerboard.
Is it possible to reduce the tx power of the routerboard to a good value for all outside devices? Or should I use other (directional) antennas?
Well each environment is unique; so.. test different power values and make your mind. You can decrease power output by 3dB, test, decrease again, etc.
Another solution is to choose who can connect to your AP:
If you don’t want some specific MAC addresses (the in-house devices) to connect to your outdoor AP, use Wireless/Access-List feature to reject them.
You can also use access-list to reject every MAC address except the ones you specifically want (your neighbors).
With winbox
Wireless->interfaces, double-click on wlan1 and go to Wireless tab. Click on “Advanced mode”
Then go to “TX power” tab and set tx power mode to “all rates fixed”; change the value and test.
Or with a console command
/interface wireless set wlan1 tx-power-mode=all-rates-fixed tx-power=10