If you deploy 3 Audience units A-B-C where B is physically in the middle, but A is the main router, how do you get C to sync to B not A? It doesn't seem to matter if you press the sync button on B, we still see C sync to A which is much farther away. Previous forum posts my Normis in 2019 led me to believe you could dictate the sync topology based on which unit you pressed the sync button to initiate sync, but that doesn't seem to be the case, probably I misunderstood.

Is there a trick to this, or is it just not possible? Is it possible but requires manual configuration changes?

The configuration that is automatically generated on the CAPs has wlan3 as station bridge and virtual wlan4 as ap bridge, all with the same SSID as wlan3 on the main unit. And every unit bridges all the ethernet and wlan interfaces together. I can't find anything different in the config on B and C that would tell C it should sync to A even though B has a much better signal.

We definitely run into houses where A, B and C are on different floors or spread out in a big house, but the Internet connection cannot easily be wired to the middle unit B. So we cannot use a star configuration, it has to be a daisy-chain.

I haven't looked yet, but I'm guessing you could turn off the default authenticate on the station bridge interface in C and add a connect list entry for the mac address of B

Hope that helps
Nick

Thanks. Your suggestion does seem to work, and as you say I had to uncheck Default Authenticate because otherwise if it synced to the less preferred unit it wouldn't switch unless forced. The alternative would be to add a no connect rule which would probably accomplish the same thing.

It would be nice if C could still sync to A in case something happened to B, but I can't find a way to retain that fallback mechanism without the risk of it getting stuck in the non optimum configuration.

I set up a lab system and it synced in the optimum configuration, that makes it easy to just copy the MAC address to the Connect List without a manual copy and paste. But at some client sites we have seen the Audience units sync in a non optimum configuration, and we have to use the Connect List as you suggest to force the correct configuration.

It would be nice if C could still sync to A in case something happened to B, but I can't find a way to retain that fallback mechanism without the risk of it getting stuck in the non optimum configuration.

To my experience the connect list is an ordered list in Mikrotik. It will try the connects in that specific sequence.

Total different situation, but I use this with my mAP Lite to search for "Free wifi" in de sequence and preference I want. (The list includes my home wifi SSID's). And that works great!
In this usage I have no experience in what happens if a more preferred failed connection becomes available again.
In station bridge there is a "roaming" parameter that will make the Mkt reevaluate its AP connection, and search for the best. The "roaming search" frequency seems to depend on the current connection quality. I don't know if it restarts the list or goes deeper in the list (like the channel list does when DFS radar is detected)

I don't know if it restarts the list or goes deeper in the list (like the channel list does when DFS radar is detected)

Use the sourcelog, Luke - when you enable logging for topics=wireless, you'll see what's going on. Even while the interface is currently registered to an AP, a re-scan of the available networks is done every 5m5s. And as you say, the first matching row of the connect-list is used even if an AP matching the further rows has a stronger signal. So if the preferred AP is higher in the connect-list, it is used whenever it is up; if it fails, the station connects to another AP, but when the preferred one comes up again, within 5m15s at the latest the station connects back to it.

Yes, Sindy. That's clear now Thanks!

(I did see that wireless log before, but was then solving the problem of a weak link loosing connection due to the scan for a better one, even without connect list entries. (Disconnects every 5 minutes on a far reaching SXTsq))

Khohhof should not forget to work with a void/empty SSID in the WLAN setup, for the connect list to work. This is what I experienced at least.