Hello,

We are/were in the process of changing our Prism APs to Atheros APs. The primary reason for this is that WDS on Prism APs broke in 2.9.5 and Mikrotik appears unwilling to acknowledge it, much less fix it. Not to mention that all new development seems to surround the Atheros cards and not the Prism cards.

We operate in a wide area network environment with clients up to about 15 miles from a tower in point-to-multipoint fashion. APs typically have up to 60 clients on them.

We converted one site with two sectors over, and things went pretty well. Some clients had to power-cycle their CPE before they would reassociate. But other than that, everything went okay.

We then proceeded to convert another site that had four sectors. On rare occasion, ONE client would associate, but then drop from the registration table a minute later. Meanwhile, there were two hundred clients trying to associate. If we put one of the sectors into sniff mode, we could see beacons being generated from the Atheros APs, and we could see tons of probe requests from clients. But no one would associate.

During this time, the two sectors that we previously converted to Atheros on another nearby tower and were working fine for four days stopped accepting new associations. This tower is closeby enough to the tower we were working on that many clients can see both towers. Since the tower we were working on with four sectors went down, it stands to reason that the clients who could "see" this other tower would try and associate there. But the Atheros APs on this tower stopped accepting new registrations. After resetting this AP, no one associated with it either.

We normally have default auth and default forward off and use RADIUS MAC Authentication. We turned default auth on and turned off the RADIUS MAC Authentication, making the system completely open, and still no one could associate on either tower

After hours of endless fiddling and rebooting, we reverted back to Prism cards, and everything came up instantly.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Is there an issue with Atheros APs where they cannot function when there are too many association requests all at once? These are Atheros 5413 cards, if its important.

Thanks in advance for any ideas/help/suggestions you can offer.

Dave

Sounds like you have the antenna connector on the wrong port of the card. It needs to be on the connector closer to the middle of the card.

John

Well thats what happened to me too with an upgrade from an old SmartBridges AP to an sr2 MT rb500 setup. The SB AP took 25 clients no problem. I was hoping the new gear would better the range etc. After a direct swapout no clients would connect. I went back indoors and started fiddling with settings and by changing to channel 4 (normally 6) a few clients came on (can't really do that other equipment nearby). When testing them the throughput was very poor! only 4 of 20 reconnected anyway. Signal levels on clients were good but something was definatly wrong. This was a busy AP and to save the agro I just put back the old AP and everything went back to normal?

One thing I wondered was if the power supply is sufficiant over longish Poe runs with 12 - 18 volts?

Also this question about the antenna port. There is two ports but the pigtail supplied by MT only will fit to the left one. Also there is software selector to left and right antennas. unless this does not work? Indoor tests would say it did?

Anybody?

I would also suggest using the most current version (which has our new driver). Some users have reported that it is better in noisy conditions.

John

Hey Tully.

Can you confirm not to use outer antenna port? Is there a problem with selecting port via MT?

Will give the new driver a go

To answer the port question.. The SR cards have two types of antenna port connectors, one is Antenna A and the other is Antenna B. This does work in the Mikrotik software as if it's set incorrectly you get nothing, or very very low signals.

With the prism cards, there is no "software switch" between antenna ports and you must use the port that is not located on the corner of the card (the one below the corner port).

The CM9 cards also support the software switch (ant-a/b), but I always use the port labeled "Main" which is on the upper right corner of the card. You'll know immediately whether or not you have the pigtail hooked up to the right port, as you'll get very poor results when deployed in a live environment.

Hope that helps.