Went out to the AP side of a site thats doing multipoint, spread is about 10 degrees between the 2 SM's. Distance is ~170m and ~340m respectively
All of them are LHG 60G
Found it was a little bit out of alignment, slightly up (about 3 degrees) and slightly too much right, but nothing crazy. Despite that it's been dropping out regularly, sometimes even in clear weather but if there's even a whiff of rain vapor in the air it'll drop
On the other hand we have another site with 1 LHG60G feeding 7 SM's (also LHG60G) and the horizontal spread is approx 120 degrees and vertical about 10. Distance is shorter at ~30-100m but its pretty solid, this is nowhere near 'aligned' on any of the radio's, they're just roughly pointed by eye
You're using LHG-60's as AP's? The antenna pattern is 3 degrees. So, across 120 degrees at ~100m, you're running off the RF equivalent of fumes.
I would strongly suggest replacing your "AP" LHG with one or two wAP-60. wAP-60's will talk to each other at 200m (60° beamwidth), and an LHG-60 pointed at a wAP-60 will go 800m+.
wAP -> wAP = ~200m (240 in my network)
wAP -> Cube = ~500m (510 in my network)
wAP -> LHG = ~800m (870m in my network)
Found a bunch of beamwidth data here:
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Interface/W60G
I have 13 wAP-60's as AP's and dozens of them, along with Cubes and LHG's as clients (about 50).
- Whats all this talk about millimetre beams? Because surely the closer site at ~170m shouldn't have connected at all if thats the case? it's now ~10 degrees off to the side, yet it does.
You're probably hitting the feed horn's patch outside of the focal point of the dish. At close range (like across the street or next door one or two houses), I've found there's a "bubble" where the wAP-60's will work without any respect to directionality. There may also be reflection off of another building or object(?). (Anecdotally, my 870m wap60-LHG60 link probably only works because it's in a little "valley" on the customer's roof formed by the proximity of two gables next to each other in the front of the house.)
- Why does the sector flap and change around so damn much?
Which firmware version are you using? Which frequency are your radios set to? I set my AP's to 6.45.9 (latest stable) and have clients on 6.45.9, 6.46.6, 6.47.x. AP's on 6.47.x are unstable for me.
- Is it still desirable to leave beamforming/tx-sector=auto on if the sector keeps changing and the error seems higher? Or should I leave the AP locked on sector 36 as that seems to do better in terms of less errors
I leave everything on auto. I don't monitor the numbers too much. I run long ping tests and let my customers tell me they're down, with occasionally checking in on the radios' logs for disconnects. Not perhaps the best way, but I've found worrying and tweaking these things too much ends up causing more issues than it fixes.
Definitely set the specific frequency for each AP. Use 64800 for longer paths. I had the most issues with 58320 on 6.47.