I’m a total newbie at this stuff and was promised the gear I describe below would be all set up to plug and play. It seems it was not and am really in need of some advice here to get everything working. Thanks in advance - John M.
The system and the problem:
We are working with a remote video system with 2 video stations plus a repeater station being forwarded to a final location for viewing. A short-range microwave antenna sends the signal from the farther video station to the nearer video station. Then long-range (40 mile) ARC antennas repeat the signal from the nearer video station to the repeater station and onto the final destination. All antennas are 5.8 GHz. There are Mikrotik routers (RB951G-2HnD) in bridge mode at the near video station and at the repeater to pass the signal from receiving antennas to transmitting antennas.
There was a problem with the field sites not ‘talking’ to each other until I changed some settings on the antennas using the Mikrotik software. The antennas were initially all set up in bridge mode but changing one or two of them to station-bridge allowed the antennas at all the field sites to talk to each other. However, I still cannot receive the signal at the final destination for viewing and am concerned that I may have caused an unstable loop somewhere. Can anyone outline for me how each antenna and bridge from farthest site to final destination should be set using the Mikrotik software - i.e. bridge, station-bridge, station-wds, etc.? Are there any other settings important to our application that should be addressed on the routerboards or antennas? Do SSIDs have to be all the same on all gear? Anything else? Thanks.