@J_peg, what's the distance between the CPE510 and the AP? What type of antenna does the AP have? Omni antennas? Indoor?

 

Can you post a screenshot of the CPE's status page (link quality is the interesting point here)?

You know that the CPE's antenna beam width is 45º only? It has been designed for directional links over very long distances, so it's almost always used outdoors. Minimum distance to not overdrive the remote receiver is about 10 meters, that's roughly 30ft.

 

What would you want to achieve with a CPE if used indoor over a distance of 6ft? The existing root AP should cover all clients around in the 30-45ft range already, shouldn't it? Or is the root AP a CPE, too? You need to provide more information about the topology and goal you want to achieve, so we can see what's wrong with the setup.

 

J_peg wrote

Root AP (Ubiquiti) ----> <---- CPE510 ----> Switch----> End Devices

There are no network drops in the area these end devices will go so I was hoping the CPE would sovle that problem. 

 

This is an unusual setup for a directional link, but nevertheless it works for me. I had to test this with Test_Mode region setting, since in my country the channels used by my indoor AP are forbidden for outdoor use (your mileage may vary in your country). My root AP is a Fritz!BOX (FB), a popular SOHO dual-band WiFi router. Distance between FB and CPE is ~12ft, two big walls in between.

 

That's what I did set up starting from factory defaults:

 

• Set the CPE510 to Client mode.
• Set 802.11n-only WiFi mode.
• Limit maximum wireless speed to MCS7 to force the FB to appear in WLAN survey.
• Perform a WLAN survey, FB uses indoor-only channel 52 (5260 MHz):

 

 

 

• Select SSID, lock the CPE510 to the FB's BSID:

 

 

 

No other settings are required for initial setup of this topology.

 

• Check connection status, note the surprisingly good SNR despite link going through two walls:

 

 

 

• Change IP setting of my laptop (wired connection to the CPE) to DHCP, instantly received a lease from the FB, could surf the Internet w/o any problems:

 

 

 

I'm not sure what you're doing wrong or what settings you use for your router's DHCP, but it definitely is not the fault of the CPE510. Maybe a wrong setup of your DHCP service, your UBNT AP or your CPE. Just try the steps I did and check whether you will receive a DHCP lease. If not, ping the UBNT AP from a device wired to the CPE and if the ping works, but still no DHCP lease received, it's almost certainly your DHCP which fails for some reason.

 

Changes are that the malfunction could also be caused by a very weak WiFi signal. I once had a case where link quality was so bad but good enough for small ICMP packets, so I could ping other devices successfully, but a data transmission with larger content always failed.

 

Further problems I see with connecting a CPE510 to an indoor SOHO WiFi device with omnidirectional antennas:

 

• Indoor devices often use other frequency bands than outdoor devices. Can be a problem if their frequency ranges are not covering all channels of each other AP.
• Antenna alignment of the CPE is critical due to the small antenna beam width of a CPE510 (I mentioned this already).
• Distance between the CPE and a SOHO device is no problem at all for the CPE, but might be a problem for the SOHO device. RF energy of the SOHO device might be too weak for stable data transmissions if no free line of sight.  

 

To summarize: connection from the CPE to a SOHO device might work, but the usual hassle-free way to connect wired devices to a network through CPEs is by using two CPEs as shown below, which will avoid all those possible problems:

 

 

 

If you just need a WiFi device which can be used in client mode to remotely connect to an AP indoors, I still don't understand why you did choose the CPE510. Any SOHO router could do this if using free OpenWRT firmware. For linking other devices to an indoor AP I would use another cheap indoor-only AP, which often comes with a 4-port switch built in already.

 

For outdoor links I would only use CPEs as shown in the diagram above even over a very short distance of 30ft – just to achieve a free line of sight for a reliable wireless link.

 

What IP uses your root-AP? What IP is assigned to the LAN the root AP is connected to? The gateway is set to IP 192.168.159.1.

 

Why is the DHCP server in another network, do you use a DHCP relay? How do you assure that the DHCP server's and root-AP's/CPE's broadcast domain is the same?

 

In my example I do this by using the DHCP server's network and broadcast domain also for the interface to which the root-AP is connected.

 

J_peg, see SNR 13 dB. That's a very weak wireless link. Compare that with my SNR of 41 dB (that's nearly 1,000 times stronger!) albeit there were no free LoS and two walls in-between. In general, a signal with an SNR value of 20 dB (that's ~ five times stronger as yours) or more is recommended for data networks.

 

So I guess that small packets such as ICMP will make it over the air, but larger packets do not.