XPost: alt.home.repair, sci.electronics.repair
From: beretta@nun-ya-bizness.com
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
On 10/16/19 5:44 PM, Arlen _G_ Holder wrote:
>
> Keeping in mind this is a USenet potluck where we're bringing "food" of
> value to share with others, I would recommend Ubiquiti to a "homeowner",
> over, say, Mikrotik. Would you concur?
>
> Assuming a common consumer needed additional range
> o And assuming they wanted to get this kind of power we speak of
> o At prices about around the same price they pay today for home routers...
>
Yeah I'd probably recommend UBNT. They tend to work out of the box. But
this word "common" is.. misleading. The average user needs to fill his
house.. Not acres of property. Most folks like in Condos / Apartments /
Track Homes. Here in the rural areas there is a need for additional
range to be sure. In fact I just installed a Rocket M2 with a couple of
8dbi omnis for a customer today.
To be totally fair, the average/common user takes a router out of the
box, plugs it in, and that's the end of it. Most folks don't even know
that their router has a UI.
>
> I have noticed that Mikrotik GUI is more of an endless assemblage of tools,
> whereas the Ubiquiti GUI is, as you noted, quite a bit more "polished".
I'd say MikroTik takes the UNIX approach. Separate tools, that each do
one thing, packaged together. This, at least partially, explains the
stability of a MikroTik router. The fact it's powered by a custom Linux
kernel certainly doesn't hurt either.
>
> As you implied, polish itself doesn't rule over the vast assortment of
> tools the Microtik equipment offers (however, I do so very much love the
> spectrum analyzer in Ubiquiti ... do you ever use it to seek out noise?)
The spectrum analyzer? Airview is, in my experience, absolutely
worthless and I've been gently pushing for UBNT to fix it or discard it.
It doesn't work AT ALL. The spectrum analyzer waterfall may/may not
work, but the implementation in the AC line of radios is absolutely
useless. I've can look at it, see I have a "noise floor" of -106 (on a
given frequency), run a site survey and pick up a foreign transmitter at
-60dbm on that exact frequency.
I'll concede that maybe it's only used for "non wifi" transmissions. But
they don't tell you that and it's counter-intuitive. To me, any
transmission that's not my own is "noise". It's a potential source of
interference. So no, I don't rely on it and don't use it as a general rule.
>
> I thank you for bringing up Cambium, which is useful to share in this
> Usenet potluck, where the goal is for laypeople like me to be able to
> vastly increase the range of our home devices, at "about the cost" of a
> common router (give or take).
If you're in a rural area, that's fine. But please do remember that
every foot you push your signal out is another foot where it's potential
noise/interference to someone else. 2.4GHz has exactly 3 non-overlapping
frequencies at 20 MHz. That's not a lot. 1, 6, 11. Anything else
overlaps another channel. If you're blasting a signal out that goes
10,000 ft beyond what you need that's not good.
My own opinion is that none of this gear is for "lay people". It's far
too easy to violate transmission limits and there's always the potential
of interfering with an operational WISP (unlikely in the 2.4 band, but
still possible) and then maybe you're fucking over dozens of people.
Honestly I'd almost like to see most of this gear require at least a
technician's FCC license to install.
>
> I really LOVE, for example, the fact I can instantly turn a desktop that
> only has Ethernet, into a desktop that has POWERFUL WiFi (not puny WiFi).
>
> Likewise, I love that a laptop with puny 30mW dBm (and, oh, maybe a 0.5dBi
> antenna?) can INSTANTLY havfe the legal limit for point to multipoint
> connections, simply by plugging this equipment into its Ethernet port.
Well, as I pointed out in an earlier message, that power is only going
to be legal if you're judicious about being totally honest in the
configuration.
>
> BTW, a _lot_ of the discussion on this thread revolved around what to "call
> it" when we use the Ethernet port to connect to an AP over Wi-Fi.
>
> What would you call it?
The term is "wireless bridge" or "wifi bridge". Both are accepted
definitions in the WISP business.
https://kb.netgear.com/227/What-is-a-wireless-bridge
> Why?
> o They are one-piece light units (they just plug it into Cat5 & Voila!)
> o They are powerful (i.e., they can transmit to the legal limit, if nec.)
And far beyond if one lies in the configuration. But here I'm beating a
dead horse.
> Do you find those UniFi "dots" (colloquial term) to be useful in practice?
No. I refuse to use them. I have... philosophical differences with UBNT
delving into the consumer side of things. Ubiquiti became a
multi-billion dollar company by making WISP gear. Now I feel as if that
side of the business is being shoved into the background as they try
expand into the home markets. Same reason I won't buy anything named
CISCO any more. Linksys buys Cisco, who were well known for having some
of the best routers and switches that money could buy, and then slaps
the name CISCO on every cheap piece of shit they could think of. CISCO,
in the span of a few years, became a joke. I had purchased a couple of
small CISCO switches and what do I find? Yeah.. Linksys internals...
>
>> I have one pair of AirFiber 5x than I never
>> got around to deploying as the piece of shit has no Site Survey function
>> and thus is mostly useless. Waste of $1K....
>
> Wow. No site survey?
Nope. Maybe later firmware has it, but I tried for over a year and no
luck..
>
>>> Here, near where Jeff Liebermann lives (other side of the hill), we all
>>> started with the bullets, and then we trashed them for the nano's, which we
>>> trashed for the 2.4 GHz rockets, and then, finally, we're kind of happy on
>>> the 5GHz rockets.
Well, Bullets are single chain, so... The Rockets are vastly superior.
>
> The value added, I think, that we can provide to the newsgroups here, is
> that the next time they're attempting to extend range (e.g., let's say they
> want their laptop at the pool to connect to the wifi at the house), they
> can simply plug one of these PowerBeams into the Ethernet port, and voila!
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