MR42E single antenna?

[dagger1982]

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

[aleabrahao]

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

[Ryan_Miles · Accepted solution]

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.

[dagger1982]

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

[Ryan_Miles]

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

[dagger1982]

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

[Thomas Obbekaer Thomsen]

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" .