I have a RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN and I would like to configure it to connect to an (external) WiFi - and then Route / NAT internally to the ether ports and possibly host AP functionality bridged to those ports.

Basically I was thinking the CPE would be connected to an external Antenna (outside of my metal building) on Chain0 - and I would use the built in Antenna on Chain1 to run my 'internal' Hotspot.

Seems like this should be pretty doable - but when I navigate to the Wireless controls (in Winbox), the default Wlan1 interface has a hardware type of Wireless (Atheros AR9300) - and it is the only interface with the tx/rx - chain0/chain1 options. I can't create any new wireless interfaces that share the same hardware type or tx/rx chains.

(I was hoping to avoid the router behind a router scenario.)

So is this achievable? (perhaps I'm just going about it the wrong way?)

For this kind of task, you need two physical radios. One dualchain antenna is not the same as two separate antennas with two physical radios.

You can have one radio acting as station and AP at the same time (using one master-wlan and one virtual-wlan), but that comes with some limitations. Splitting chains as you described is not good way to solve this.

Having multiple devices is not a bad scenario. They do not have act as routers - you can set them up as bridges so they are transparent for the network and only one act as router.

Please consider to the following steps to resolve your issue:

1. Detach wlan from "bridge"
2. Click wlan and do scanning for the selected SSID that you want to connect with.
3. Using ip-firewall-nat for routing scrnat to wlan via masqurade
4. You may create a virtual interface and attach to the "bridge" in Step 1. (I am not sure but you can try)

Hope the above steps can help you.

YH

Thank you vecernik87.

See this video https://youtu.be/nHcGSGOinR0 .