The Second MR86 AP (Repeater) is not connecting to the First MR86 AP (Gateway)

[SAMRBAHNAM]

Hi all,

I'm wondering if can someone help me troubleshoot why The Second MR86 AP (Repeater) is not connecting to the First MR86 AP (Gateway)?

The distance is about 64 meter and there are some trees in between

 The transmition power is shown below

 I've disabled the 5G and only enabled the 2.4G (thinking that 2.4 is covering larger distances and I don't want the APs get busy trying to communicate using 5G)

I'm not getting close to 30 dBm transmition power (I've contacted meraki support and they said this is normal), I'm in Melbourne btw and using the four MA-ANT-20 antennas per AP.

Any suggestions will be welcomed 🙂

[AMP]

One thing to try is manually setting the 2.4 channel on both access points to the same either 1,6, or 11 channels. If you can bring up the repeater AP temporarily on an ethernet cable or walk it closer to the gateway AP to get a connection then make the change in dashboard to the channel and make sure it does a config fetch then go install.

[SAMRBAHNAM]

Thank you for the reply, I'll try to do that and keep you informd.

[cmr]

I think the two APs are too far away.  I have some CW9163Es and the one with omnidirectional antennas does not throw a usable signal 64m away.  It drops off completely at 69m, but is only one bar before 64m.  There is a pretty clear line of sight from the AP to the client.  Interestingly the 5GHz goes about as far as the 2.4Ghz as the radio power can go higher.

I believe the directional patch antenna should go further, but I haven't had a chance to complete the testing of that yet.

For your distance I think you'll need narrow patch antennas for it to work.

[SAMRBAHNAM]

Thank you for the reply, I'm surprised that these APs not covering that distance!

[alemabrahao]

First you need to connect it on the cloud as a gateway and then you can use it as a repeater.

[SAMRBAHNAM]

Thank you for the reply, I did that with no luck 😞

[PhilipDAth]

Bring them closer together temporarily.  Does it come online then?

64m is a big ask ... and then you also want to punch through trees.  I think this is unlikely to work.

[SAMRBAHNAM]

Thank you for the reply, I'll do that and keep you informd.