I am using the hAP ac3 as a router and want to add a second access point in my living room.
Currently, only audience has a rich specification (4x4 MIMO 802.11ac Wave 2, 802.11a/b/g, 802.11n, 802.11ac) and looks good despite its the 4.5 dBi antennas.

Does ROS 7 allow me to fully use its potential as a 4x4 MU-MIMO Wave2 access point with a dual-port 802.1Q switch and do the drivers fully support QCA9984?

I have an Audience serving as a WAP on only.

Installed routerOS7. Added the wifi Wave 2 drivers. Defaulted the unit to no configuration.

Added everything to bridge.
Added a DHCP client.
Configured all 3 radios.

Best wifi serving client performance I have ever seen, from Mikrotik.

It's about equal to WAPs I used in 2016... Ut you loose a lot of Mikrotik features/functionality when you use the WAVE2 drivers.

I have an Audience serving as a WAP on only.

Installed routerOS7. Added the wifi Wave 2 drivers. Defaulted the unit to no configuration.

Added everything to bridge.
Added a DHCP client.
Configured all 3 radios.

Best wifi serving client performance I have ever seen, from Mikrotik.

It's about equal to WAPs I used in 2016... Ut you loose a lot of Mikrotik features/functionality when you use the WAVE2 drivers.

Thank you for sharing your experience.
Order has been shipped.

Have you ever used ac3?

I have an Audience serving as a WAP on only.

Installed routerOS7. Added the wifi Wave 2 drivers. Defaulted the unit to no configuration.

Added everything to bridge.
Added a DHCP client.
Configured all 3 radios.

Best wifi serving client performance I have ever seen, from Mikrotik.

It's about equal to WAPs I used in 2016... Ut you loose a lot of Mikrotik features/functionality when you use the WAVE2 drivers.

Thank you for sharing your experience.
Order has been shipped.

Have you ever used ac3?

I have one of those too.

Configured it the same way. Well 2 radios vs 3.

Thank you for sharing your experience.
Order has been shipped.

Have you ever used ac3?

I have one of those too.

Configured it the same way. Well 2 radios vs 3.

Great, so you have experience with both of them!

Which one has better range and stability?
My goal is to upgrade to the 80 MHz channel.

I am using the Audience. The hAP AC3 is sitting in it's box.

I found the 4x4 set to 149 @ 80mhz seems to perform the best.

In terms of configuration as an Access Point/Switch
See item D - viewtopic.php?t=182373

Can i get some help here howto configure the radios for best performance?

Updated to latest 7.1.4, added wifi wave 2 package, dhcp client on bridge and added all ports to bridge. Now im unsure how to configure all 3 radios. What channel, what band, what width for all 3 of them? Which security to use? WPA2 and/or 3 ?

Can i get some help here howto configure the radios for best performance?

Updated to latest 7.1.4, added wifi wave 2 package, dhcp client on bridge and added all ports to bridge. Now im unsure how to configure all 3 radios. What channel, what band, what width for all 3 of them? Which security to use? WPA2 and/or 3 ?

That depends on what you need........... what are the three default chains 1x2.4 and 2x5 ?
By the way that does not limit you to 3 WLANS, you can create virtual WLANs that will run off the same master radio.
So you could have 2 of each 3 of each 4 of each etc...... although I wouldnt go past 3 each myself.
Depends on how many WLANS you need.

As for frequencies, no spoons here, go look up the WIFI radio frequency spectrum allocation for the country you live in and see what is available and then space out the 5ghz WLANS appropriately. As for 2ghz common practice is 1-6-11 for channel spacing.

I believe WPA3 only works with WPA3 devices but the standard is backwards compatible with WPA2 so that it can work with older devices.
If true then see no reason why not to set to WPA3.......... and let the device figure it out......
I tend to be conservative and go only up to 20Mhz for 2.4gig and 40Mhz for 5gig but perhaps for the audience with less MT guts and more standard wifi guts, the 80Mhz is now palatable.

Well looking for “best setup”. Just unboxed this at work, but a standard config with just a crypto key and set wpa 2 and 3 psk. Nothing else. Then same configuration on all 3 radios with Sweden as country. Over 500 mbps both up n down on phone. We have 1000mbit WAN connection

Nice but acting as AP and not a router correct?
How many LANs or subnets involved, just one??

Well looking for “best setup”. Just unboxed this at work, but a standard config with just a crypto key and set wpa 2 and 3 psk. Nothing else. Then same configuration on all 3 radios with Sweden as country. Over 500 mbps both up n down on phone. We have 1000mbit WAN connection

With WifiWave2 or the standard package? If your using wifiwave2, it's very particular on the settings. Annoyingly it will take bad ones, and then give show "invalid channel" in the interface list. What you may be running into is the 2nd 5Ghz Wi-Fi (the "mesh" one) has 4 chains, while the 1st 5Ghz one has 2 chains. Obviously more chains mean theoretically higher channel width. So you likely just need to use different channels specs on the different Wi-Fi interfaces, instead of it inheriting the parent configuration.

But at the end of the day, you RF environment is going to dictate the max speed. But to get the highest speeds you'll want to the 5Ghz interface with the 4 chains on the audience.

Nice but acting as AP and not a router correct?
How many LANs or subnets involved, just one??

@anav, dunno if you've played with wifiwave2 BUT all configuration is like CAPsMAN with the profiles/configuration/etc. So it's not quite as straightforward word on the channel/width stuff... A "configuration" gets applied to an wifiwave2 interface, so you only know if something isn't compatibility after you've hit "OK" and the whole interface goes invalid. And, on the Audience there are 2 x 5Ghz antennas, and one is better than the other. But the better one comes up disabled since it's not compatible with the default wifi configuration profile MT installs with wifiwave2....

Anyway the wifiwave2 may be where he's having trouble...

i have an Audience operating in AP with Ros 6.48.6

i use 4x4 radio at 5500mhz/160mhz Ceeeeeee for Laptops supporting 160mhz (intel 9260 and intel ax210), 2x2 5ghz radio and 2x2 2,4ghz radio for other devices

works well, the only caveat is radar detection on 5500mhz takes 10 minutes after reboot or any change on wlan3

i have not tried ros7 and/or wave2 on this device, you are encouraging me to do it

Thank you for all replies so far! Im on ROS 7.1.4 with wifi wave 2 package. Its supposed to serve my WLAN at home so just one subnet involved and the main router is RB3011. I will power it via an RB260GSP with PoE.

Im pretty unsure i have correct setup?

wifi1 has band 2GHz N, 20Mhz width with channel 2412
wifi2 has band 5GHz AC, 20MHz width with channel 5180

Cant get wifi3 to work proper. I tried here with 5GHz AC, 20/40/80/160MHz and channel 5745. It says DFS channel availible only. Was looking here for accepted channels in Sweden: https://www.nowire.se/kanaler-och-frekvenser-for-5-ghz/ and as I understand 5745 is accepted here? But it wont select that channel.

I use same security config for all 3 interface and have only set passphrase and using WPA2 PSK and WPA3 PSK.

Normally, when I setup router/accesspoints for friends I use Capsman and wAP AC and in the caps conf I use to have the same SSID for both 2.4 and 5GHz and let the client choose. Works good. Can I use it here too? Might not work and the devices that have compatible hardware for using the the 4 chain interface maybe wont select that? How should i set this? Maybe same SSID for wifi2 and 2 and a separate for wifi3 so i get use of the speed of that interface?

Setup is a bit confusing since its a bit different than on ROS6 and im a bit unsure here!

EDIT:

After 10 mins the wifi3 interface did choose channel 5500, dunno why?

Speed is really good but can be better?! Here's a test on an iPhone12 on wifi3 interface:

Setup is a bit confusing since its a bit different than on ROS6 and im a bit unsure here!

I spit out my coffee reading the last line. I am NEVER sure when configuring the MT device.
I blame it on Sob who has instilled great insecurity into my configuring prowess!

Most on the forum be surprised you got >100Mb/s from any Mikrotik device. In fact, I would have attributed @anav's

I spit out my coffee reading the last line.

to your decent speedtest results...

I've never tried to use 80Mhz or more with Wi-Fi. But with the wifiwave2 "less is more" is the best configuration model. So in Channels, you should only have "Sweden" selected in your case.

Once you start selecting a channel, you have to specify more I think and it has to match what's available on the chipset exactly. And I can't recall but you may have to specify the channel range, not just a center frequency. And, not sure winbox helps you get it right, so if you do want to play with the setting more, I'd recommend using the CLI under /interfaace/wifiwave2. There you can see the available choices when doing a "set", since they support "tab completion".

So I suspect the "mesh"/4ch wifi interface will work if you remove the channel selection, and leave everything but the country as empty/not configured. Maybe use a different ssid name on it, so you can compare.

It's possible to configure the channels etc., but it's just not automatic or easy with wifiwave2.

I did some tests with a couple Audiences a while back, I have the configuration I used here: viewtopic.php?t=180369

Apparently I was using "skip DFS" – more interested in stability than max speed so why risk a DFS event (or bug). Why I wouldn't like have gotten any >80Mhz.

OK I'll try with just Sweden and let the AP choose channel. Do i need to select chains? How do I know wifi3 interface will use all 4 of its chains if not selecting them? Its possible to tick chain 0, 1, 2, 3. Should I?

EDIT: If just settings SSID, Country and to use 5GHz AC with 20/40/80/160 directly under the wifi3 interface it takes 10 mins to "provision" the wifi as its scans for DFS channel. Theres no way around this? Takes forever to test out different configs if i need to wait 10 mins every time i change anything in the config.

OK I'll try with just Sweden and let the AP choose channel. Do i need to select chains? How do I know wifi3 interface will use all 4 of its chains if not selecting them? Its possible to tick chain 0, 1, 2, 3. Should I?

EDIT: If just settings SSID, Country and to use 5GHz AC with 20/40/80/160 directly under the wifi3 interface it takes 10 mins to "provision" the wifi as its scans for DFS channel. Theres no way around this? Takes forever to test out different configs if i need to wait 10 mins every time i change anything in the config.

I'd say use /interface/wireless/spectral-scan but that doesn't work with the wifi chipset on the Audience. And don't think it works with any wifiwave2 device.

Re 10 min, also another reason I just disabled DFS. In reality having a good speediest result isn't generally as useful as an QEF link. Maybe your in the middle of nowhere, but generally speaking 160Mhz channel, especially with Wave2/WiFi5 isn't going to be a good plan since speed could dramatically change if your neighbors used any of the 160Mhz you were trying to use. With Wi-Fi 6, using wider channels is more practical. But wifiwave2 does NOT do OFDMA from 802.11ax "Wi-Fi 6".

Sob actually provided the list of supported frequencies you can pick from – you must use one of those. Try the 1 min ones perhaps?

OK, got a bit deeper into this. The configuration is, as someone else said, pretty much like the Capsman config. I went to the Wireless Table and looked into Radios to see whats supported. Upon this I built Channels and Configuration.

The standard 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio has 2 Tx and 2 Rx Chains with 20/40MHz band width. The "stronger" 5GHz radio has 4 Tx and 4 Rx Chains with 20/40/80/160MHz band width. No channel frequency set as I tried to let the AP choose this. I configured the channels like this:


Then over to configurations. For the standard 2.4GHz and 5GHz I did use the same SSID and let the client choose what to use. I did set Tx and Rx chains to be sure it would use them. Specified the above created channels in the Channel tabs and also pointed out the security. This ended up in one SSID using both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, let the AP select frequencies. The SSID name MikroTik Audience 2x2 was just an idea for the use of 2x2 chains. Then a third config for the stronger 5GHz radio with proper chain/channel/security config:


I created 2 different security. One for the 2x2 SSID and one for the 4x4 SSID. The idea here was to let the family use the 2x2 for their devices such as phone, tablets, laptops etc. along with household products as washing machine, drying machine etc. and the I would use the 4x4 myself got get more bandwith as the 2x2 gets a bit limited leaving room for me I did use WPA2-PSK and WPA3-PSK with CCMP, GCMP, CCMP256, GCMP256 on both.

Finally I just pointed out the 3 configurations to wifi1, wifi2, wifi3.

I did fire up a virtual machine quickly with Ubuntu server and installed iPerf to test the bandwith of the internal LAN as I only have 250/250 on WAN. Here's the result on 2x2:


And 4x4:


Is there anything I can change or tweak to get out more speed or is this already at its very best?

EDIT: I also updated to ROS 7.2rc4.

Others can comment HOW good that is, seem good to me. But there just not a lot of stats/quality indicators wifiwave2 presents to you to know what to tweak. You can use this to see neighbors strength for the 3rd wifi interface (2nd 5Ghz 4-chain "mesh"), might help pick a good channel:
If you change it to "wifi2" that the 1st 5Ghz, or "wifi1" is the single 2.4Ghz radio.. You'd what to run it for a little bit of time to get a good sense what transitory things may appear. I'm not 100%, but even if frequency-scan shows a clean channel, other sources of interference may still not show up there since the scan is only looking for 802.11 protocol. e.g. so non Wi-Fi interference may not show up in frequency-scan. But still better than flying blind guessing channels.

Similarly, maybe try a 5 minute test to see if it's holding at 300Mb/s, or if the average drops over longer period test.... Or move further away, eg the max point you expect to use it, to see if the speed is also okay there. You can also find your device in "Registration" to find the signal level, if it improves, its possible you'd see higher speeds.

Basically with wifiwave2 there are just less "tweaks" possible, or YMMV seemingly needed. We use wifiwave2 on ~half dozen devices, I've sent the channels to 40Mhz and no-dfs and call it good, no one has complained. But I wasn't trying to maximize the speedtest result. For that, yeah you need a wide channel, and well, luck on your environment.

I use Audience as an second AP and I have an FTTH 240/36 Mbps link, therefore the 80MHz channel fully saturates the link (I can see devices registered with the maximum speed of ac@5GHz i.e 866 Mbps), and the latency is below 20ms.
I am going to stay on ROS 6 until Wave2 drivers support CAPsMAN.
I have had a problem with DFS, the interface stayed inactive because although I have set channel 155, the second channel was also selected in the DFS range e.g.:5745/20-Ceee/ac(25dBm)+5530/80/DP(14dBm) so , forcing "Skip DFS channels" has resolved the problem.

The wlan3 interface is locked below 5500MHz by MT thus you don't have a choice other than the channel 155 @ 80MHz (5745).
This works for me: BTW There are only two 160MHz channels and both are DFS https://www.ekahau.com/blog/channel-pla ... ter-wi-fi/.
There are the schemes 1,5,9,13 @ 20MHz for 802.11 g / n and 3,11 @ 40MHz for 802.11n for 2.4GHz Wi-Fi available in Europe (especially ch11 is very promising as commonly used ch6 hits ch3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels