On 3 May 2018, at 23:59, Travis Garrison travis@netviscom.com wrote:
With the new firmware they can be setup as PTMP. We only use the radios as PTP though. The stations are any clients radios that are connected. I don’t really know why Mikrotik decided that the 60GHz needed it’s own area for setup and monitoring. Makes no sense to me, why not use the same area as it’s always been.
For some reason they decided to handle the 60 GHz interface in a different way than the classical wireless networks.
At first I think they only intended to use them as point to point links. Now there is an option to set up a unit as a sort of “AP” supporting multiple clients. And rather than creating an interface with wireless clients (as the 802.11 wireless support does) they create a virtual interface for each station associated to the AP, configuring those interfaces as ports of a bridge.
The 60 GHz interfaces have some unique parameters as well. These interfaces have phased array beamforming antennas and the units keep a table of beam configurations. The number you see in the tx-sector and rx-sector variables is just an index into a table of antenna configuration parameters.
For example,
[admin@w60-master] /interface w60g station> monitor 0 connected: yes remote: 30:07:4D:XX:XX:XX mcs: 8 phy-rate: 2.3Gbps signal: 80 rssi: -52 tx-sector: 21 tx-sector-info: left 11.4 degrees, down 11.4 degrees rx-sector: 96
It is using configuration number 21 for transmission which, in this software version, seems to be a narrow beam pointing 11.4 degrees down, 11.4 degrees left. Interestingly, rx-sector always shows the same value.
It’s a new product and they are making lots of changes as far as I know. Two weeks ago they replaced the antenna configuration table opting for narrower lobes with a much higher gain. Now they allow the user to configure a fixed “tx-sector” parameter as well. I guess we will still see other significant changes.
Besides, as far as I know Mikrotik’s RouterOS doesn’t support the wireless interface MIB.
Borja.