Ok, so I've something CRAZY and set up these two 360 degree sites with WAP 60GAP's and those shields.
Take a look at my picture.
So the shields did help with two things. They helped with mounting to a J Arm and allowing uptilt or downtilt as necessary for area focus.
They also appear to help a bit with isolation such that the clients tend to 'stick' better and register better/first to their appropriate AP geographically.
As of right now these two sites and clients are running latest test at v6.47beta49 which I think was supposed to help with 'sticking' on an AP and not flapping between them.
All AP's are on the same SSID. I'm sort of re-using some channels back to back.
Overall it's pretty solid so far, but 'fringe' CPE's, and even some in the 'middle' of the AP sector are selecting AP's adjacent to them and won't 'move' to their correct AP.
I've got a support/feature request in to Mikrotik right now to have them implement a "preferred MAC AP" for those of us using area wide same SSID.
I really really don't think that would be a hard feature to ask for, should be rather simple in code really to have it prefer an AP with a MAC address unless it absolutely cannot see or connect to it, then fall back to just SSID.
I do get the benifit in this scenario of allowing the CPE's to connect to adjacent AP's and most of them do when the main/preferred/center AP goes offline (like for upgrades).
I created a simple script action to disable the wireless, wait 10 seconds and re-enable the wireless to attemp the CPE to reconnect to a better AP. Seems to work about half the time.
So there is still a lot of work to do on/in the software I think to get these radios to pick an optimal AP if using shared SSID area wide.
I also asked them if there was some possible way to set one of the AP's as a 'timing master' network wise so all AP's on the same switch could sync up and broadcast and receive at same timing windows. Not sure if that's even possible, likely a pipe dream for this hardware, but would probably help a lot in this 360 degree scenario.
The test package I'm running right now (mentioned above) does seem to allow disconnects a lot more often, customers seeing more brief outages and Dude showing them changing internal sectors more often, therefore changing signal and modulation more often than on Stable.
I might have to roll back to Stable and live there, but would really like them to change and get things a bit better in the next release first.
What do you all think?
5G-JR.jpg
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