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I needed internet access at a hill top communications site for an amateur radio D-Star gateway computer. While I could have used one of the many spare phone lines on site to set up an ADSL connection, I already have two ADSL services at home and didn’t really want the ongoing expense of setting up another one. I have line of sight to the hill (~2.4 km) so I figured some kind of wireless link was needed. I’ve experimented with outdoor 802.11b gear for many years, but I really wanted something a bit more reliable than off the shelf domestic network equipment.
I did some research both on the web and via peer input and decided that Mikrotik was the way to go. Others had used Mikrotik/Routerboard for applications just like mine with excellent results.
I found a link to Duxtel on the Mikrotik website and found Mike Everest to be most helpful pre, during and post sale.
I decided on the Mikrotik RIC522C outdoor 5.8GHz 802.11a integrated router/antenna.
The units arrived promptly and were already pre-configured for my application. I started testing them out at home using my home theatre as a guinea pig. I connected all the equipment in my home theatre rack that normally connected to a wired network via the Mikrotik link across the room. At one stage, I was streaming internet audio on my AV receiver, playing an AVI file stored on my office PC on a network DVD player and then streaming video back from the equipment rack to a laptop PC using my Slingbox. The pair of Mikrotik/Routerboards handled this with no packet loss at all!! Very impressive although the RF communication distance was only around 8 metres. The real test was to come later…
It was then discovered that one of the antenna housings had been slightly dented on one corner during shipping. After contacting Mike about this and with no questions asked, he arranged a swap for me. Customer service like this that really makes me smile! The problem was due to no fault of his own, but he went out of his way to rectify the situation. Thumbs up Mike!
The Mikrotik/Routerboard systems were installed, one at the remote comms site and the other on my TV antenna mast at home and they performed almost flawlessly from day one of deployment. There was a slight issue at the remote end due to RF interference from another radio system, but this was rectified by moving the Mikrotik/Routerboard antenna to a slightly different location. Since then, the uptime has been 100% and I have a fast & reliable network link between the two locations. I have throttled the link back to 18 MBps which is far in excess of what is needed for my application. I have also customized the WPA encryption key from the default, just for a little extra security and I added some IP address in the 192.168.0.0/24 range on the wired interface. Apart from these changes, the rest of the default configuration was retained.
I am so happy with the performance of this equipment, I wouldn’t hesitated in recommending the same solution to others needing a reliable RF based network link between two locations.
If only my ISP was as reliable as the link to the hill!
Michael Carey
PORT LINCOLN
South Australia
Rating:  [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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