MR42E single antenna?

Solved
dagger1982
Conversationalist

MR42E single antenna?

I don't know why but our warehouse/distribution center only uses a single external antenna on our MR42E AP's. Tell me, how unhealthy is this for the AP?

 

thx

1 Accepted Solution
Ryan_Miles
Meraki Employee
Meraki Employee

We have this bit in documentation. Is it a long shot? Yes probably, but be warned it could happen.

 

From a performance perspective if you have an AP without antennas those ports are still attempting to be used by the radios. Obviously the tx/rx performance will be severely impacted without an antenna. And, with a MIMO AP it's expecting to use all antenna ports.

 

There's no situation in which running with disconnected antenna ports would be the correct way to deploy.

Ryan

If you found this post helpful, please give it Kudos. If my answer solves your problem please click Accept as Solution so others can benefit from it.

View solution in original post

6 Replies 6
alemabrahao
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

Basically you are just transmitting a signal by one antenna. I think it's not a good idea.

I am not a Cisco Meraki employee. My suggestions are based on documentation of Meraki best practices and day-to-day experience.

Please, if this post was useful, leave your kudos and mark it as solved.
Ryan_Miles
Meraki Employee
Meraki Employee

We have this bit in documentation. Is it a long shot? Yes probably, but be warned it could happen.

 

From a performance perspective if you have an AP without antennas those ports are still attempting to be used by the radios. Obviously the tx/rx performance will be severely impacted without an antenna. And, with a MIMO AP it's expecting to use all antenna ports.

 

There's no situation in which running with disconnected antenna ports would be the correct way to deploy.

Ryan

If you found this post helpful, please give it Kudos. If my answer solves your problem please click Accept as Solution so others can benefit from it.
dagger1982
Conversationalist

Thank you. Exactly what I was looking for. I worked with transceivers in the USAF and know a missing antenna is a bad thing.

Hey, me too. I did F16 Avionics in the USAF back in the 90s. Man, I'm old.

Ryan

If you found this post helpful, please give it Kudos. If my answer solves your problem please click Accept as Solution so others can benefit from it.

Heavy avionics 85-06. C130, C141, C5, etc. LOL I'm older. IT is my second life.

 

thomasthomsen
Head in the Cloud

As mentioned by everyone, it's not "the correct" way of running your AP (aka. bad 🙂 ). But you could get support to disable the other radio chains, and only have the one with the connected antenna enabled.

It would still be bad, because of no diversity or mimo features would be in use, but better then running something where the same features would ruin things more when running, ehhh,  "improper antenna configurations" .

 

Get notified when there are additional replies to this discussion.
Welcome to the Meraki Community!
To start contributing, simply sign in with your Cisco account. If you don't yet have a Cisco account, you can sign up.
Labels