Hello all,

I am having a problem that I hope someone can help me with. I have an AP with an RB433AH and two R52 transceiver cards. I use one of the cards as an AP bridge for the 11g access network and the other card as an station for a 11a wireless backhaul to a wireless router (waveteq shadowmaster) on a tower. I have a good SNR (35-40 db) but my connection seems to be very intermittent. It will go from working very well to not at all, even though it still shows as associated to the backhaul site. I am not currently using WDS between the AP and the backhaul unit as I'm not sure if they are compatible. I enabled the wireless logging but it doesn't register any helpful info. Does anyone have any suggestions for a semi-desperate network tech?

Thanks,
Jason

Jason, provide more info if you could. You say the connectoin goes bad? How your sigmal level goes low? the CCQ drops? or is everthing look fine just poor latency or throughput? Could you clarify the following..

When things are working well, what is your CCQ latency and throughput, when its not working well what changes here? Also take a close look at the hw frames in TX/RX vs the TX/RX frames in the signal window are you seeing large differences in these two fields?

With some more informatoin we may be able to at the very least give you some directoin.

Thank you
Tim Steele
MCSE
e-ISCO

Hello Tim,

My signal level and Noise floor stay pretty constant resulting in about a 30 db signal to noise. Looking at the CCQ in the status window it seems to vary quite a bit, from 65% all the way to 100% even with the steady signal level. When I say the connection goes bad I mean that any attempts to send or receive traffic during that outage time out.

Because the unit on the backhaul end is not a mikrotik box I havent done any throughput testing yet but according to the p-throughput item on the interface monitor I should be running between 17 and 23 Mbits and that doesn't vary when it's working or not.

My Tx/Rx frames are 89530/146819 while my Tx/Rx Hw Frames are 117718/146819.

To add to the strangeness some applications seem to work while others will not. For example, I am connected to the AP from home via winbox and I use pings to see when the connection is up or down. I will ping from the AP to my home and from my home to the AP. My pings will time out in one direction, but not necessarily the other, but my winbox session continues to work and provide me with info. *sigh* I hate intermittent problems.

Thanks in advance for the assitance, hopefully the info above is meaningful.

Jason

Just to let everyone know, with the help of Butch Evans we were able to determine the problem was related to v3.14 of RouterOS, when we upgraded the AP to 3.15 it resolved itself.