station bridge

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

I can connect via wlan to an AP by setting the wlan to “station” or “station bridge” mode (both devices are MT hAP ac^2 with RouterOS v6.47).
I wonder what the difference between “station” and “station bridge” is. What are the capabilities of these modes? When should one use which mode?
Is there a documentation about this “station bridge” mode?

Update:
found this wiki page https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Wireless_Station_Modes#Mode_station-bridge
It says

Mode station-bridge
This mode works only with RouterOS APs and provides support for transparent protocol-independent L2 bridging on the station device. RouterOS AP accepts clients in station-bridge mode when enabled using bridge-mode parameter. In this mode, the AP maintains a forwarding table with information on which MAC addresses are reachable over which station device.

This mode is MikroTik proprietary and cannot be used to connect to other brands of devices.

This mode is safe to use for L2 bridging and is the preferred mode unless there are specific reasons to use station-wds mode. With station-bridge mode, it is not possible to connect to CAPsMAN controlled CAP.

Can someone please tell me what this practically means? Does it mean multiple devices on the station side can be reached from the AP side?

2

Station mode is just like a wireless client connecting to your AP. The link you provided gives details about the “3 mac problem”. I found this out when I used this mode to connect a bunch of PCs to my main network over wireless. They could see the internet but anything on my main network couldn’t see the PCs. This is a inherent problem with the 802.11 standard.

The solution is to use station bridge. This is a mikrotik proprietary format and will only work between mikrotiks.Other vendors have similar proprietary formats but they will only work between their devices. This gives you a full layer 2 bridge so all devices on either side of the bridge can see each other.

3

Yes, that’s exactly it. Read the section “802.11 limitations for L2 bridging” in the link you provided.

PS. sorry about answering a 2 year old question. I misread the date as June this year