I have two rb200 both have an Atheros AR5211 card. The units are 3/4 of a mile apart both clear line of site from the top of my building to the top of a 30" tower on the mountain and no trees around it. There is a larger cell tower about 200" behind and to the right of our tower.
I was using an omni 10db at 5200 mhz at the tower and on our office a directional 30db cone type antani listed that I bought from mikrotik (listed on this site.
The link strenth was -79 and I was able to set the bandwidth to 24Megs.
We needed to setup another link which was 5 miles across the valley to the omni but we could never get a connection. After some investigating I was told that regulatory requirements in 5.2 forced the 802.11a cards to use a lower power at 5.2 instead of using 5.8.
So yesterday we replaced the antani on our roof to a 22db grid antani at 5805 mhz and droped our tower and replaced the 5.2 omni with a 5.8 10db omni.
our link strenth is now -70. but i am only able to get 6m link now.
And I sitll can not get a connection at the other location across the valley.
Do you have any suggestions what to try next? I have some the sr2 or sr5 cards (forget at the mometn which one is 802.11a). Which means I could run the card at 400mw but personally just throwing extra power on the connection to me isn't nessary always the best way to solve the issue. I'd rather have a better lower power connection than having to push the singal out much harder with power.
Thanks for your suggestions,
Michael Perdue