I got one of these cheap off of ebay ~ $50 or so. I read how mikrotik had a steeper learning curve than other similar devices. But I've been a sysadmin for 10 years, so I figured I would be able to figure it out.

But an hour in and I have made zero progress to even get as far as winbox. Turning it on and I never see a wireless lan called Mikrotik come across at all and the lights for 5/2.4/CAP never come on. If I plug into my router, I do see the ETH led briefly, but it goes out. And it never shows up in the device list on the router.

I went ahead and used netinstall to reinstall the firmware (routeros-mipsbe-6.41.3.npk) and that worked with zero issues. According to the seller this was pulled out of a working environment, using it as a WISP AP.

The seller thought it would be a good idea for me to post on these forums.

You bought a device that was used somewhere before with some configuration you know nothing about and due to that you were unable to get access so you solved it by netinstall and you are complaining here about it? You did what you should and everything is fine so what is the problem?

Even after resetting to factory defaults I was not seeing the wireless network Mikrotik and unable to use winbox.

On reddit, someone suggested that I put it into CAP mode and see if I could connect to it with winbox at that point. And it worked. So I’m finally in.

Directions to put in CAP mode:
1) Hard wire WAP to your computer
2) Manually configure IP to 192.168.88.x subnet. Though I am not sure that is actually necessary. I believe it makes the connection using the MAC address.
3) Hold reset button until 2.4/5 goes solid and release button when CAP starts blinking.
4) Wait one minute for WAP to start up. Open winbox and check neighbor. You should see your WAP MAC address!
5) Connect and you’re in!

I wrote a post about my experiences overall with the setup. You can find it here.

But everything is up and going well with the wAP AC now.