WAP AC vs. AX beam width

Hardware MikroTik hardware general
1

So, after i already ordered two Wap AX because i have very good experiences from Wap AC i noticed somewhere in specifications, that it only covers 180 degrees at front. Why decision to downgrade previus capablities of AC, that had 360 degrees coverage?

Probably just my luck, that i planned to use it outside, connecting it to neighbours WIFI in a house 10 meters away, right behind the antenna.

Not particulary happy with my decision now.

2

https://fccid.io/document.php?id=7634095

Here you can see it very well.

3

Usually when you wall mount an AP the idea is to “spread” the Wi-Fi away from the wall.
I still use Wap AC when needing 360° but thats extremely rare.

4

That is true, but if you choose pole mount, then you need two of them now. And my usage case probably won’t work since it has quite big metal plate behind antenna.

5

I am curious what kind of situation you have where the AP will be mounted right in front of a big metal plate?

The metal plate will likely affect any transmitter-antenna radiation pattern.

Any way to give it above or below, or simply farther away from the plate?

6

Both wap ac and wap ax are identical in coverage or ax even better than ac. i have upgraded sworms of waps to wap ax.

Both devices have metal heatsink in the back, if i remember correctly, wap ac didn’t have that initially, and then had it in later revisions. but wap ax have it initially, so there you go - “metal plate on the back”.

So wap ax is just showing specifications correctly as wap ac should have, when metal heatsink was introduced

7

wAPac ARM version have metal heatsink identical to wAPax.

8

Oh!!! The heat sink!

I thought the OP was mounting the AP on a large flat metal plate, such as a building wall made out of metal or a large metal sign or something like that.

Nevermind….

9

Ok, so my plan to simply change this AX with the AC variant won’t make any difference if ARM version of AC also has such heatsink. I will try to mount the AX and see what i can get from the back of the device on 5 Ghz band.

Edit. I had to turn antenna arround so now i don’t have the range, but i do have speed. Wap facing forward, download speed 60 Mbps, Wap facing toward modem, download speed 140 Mbps.

Guess i’m gonna need another one for good coverage arround house.