I have a hotspot in a small hotel with thick walls. Have a mikrotik router with 3 wireless cards. Each goes through coax to an antenna in different sections of the building. Is it best to use the same essid and channel on each card? Or should each one be on a different channel?

for different three wireless cards u can use same ssid ,but better to use different channels because it could not overlap on each other....1,6,11 channels can use


viswayk

During Mikrotik training I was thinking we were told to use the same channel on all cards to create seamless roaming in motel. Perhaps I remember wrong.

If you're using WDS between the radios, they need to have both the same SSID and channel. I have heard that this allows "seamless roaming" for clients, but I have never set up a system like that so I can't speak from experience. Normally, I would give the radios the same SSID, put them on non-overlapping channels, and bridge them (to the same hotspot interface, for example).

Long antenna cables can cost you a lot of signal, both Tx and Rx. It often works better to deploy a separate AP, since Cat5 has a range of 100m, and you still have full radio strength at the far end.