@d0ugmac1 and @OddErikD 

Thanks Doug very much for the extra advice and info!

Hi @OddErikD I hope you don't me responding in your thread? I intend to create a thread of my own for Heckington Show soon. I think both your project and mine have similar problems and discussion points.

The info in above posts about positioning/mounting of AP's on masts was very interesting as it was preying on my mind. Plus of course all the weather related aspect.

Gig fibre is new in our village. The ISP who provide it will also have a trade stand at the show!

We are getting 1GB business broadband installed by ISP at a house adjacent to the showground fields.

There are no existing major structures for us to attach things to other than what gets put up for the Show, eg lighting rigs, stages, marquees, and various trees and hedges to work around too!

This (first) year we are providing the traders wifi access for free, with no guarantees of throughput. Next year we will fine-tune according to our experience.

The house has a cabinet installed for fibre/ONT (optical network terminator), the TP-Link controller, router, TL-SG2008P switch, and the "transmit" CPE710 mounted 6m high on the house beaming 350m over to the second field, to the "receive" CPE710 likely 6-8m high on a marquee pole, down to a TL-SG2008P, then wired/PoE to main uplink EAP650 of Mesh2. Fresnel calculated for this distance line-of-sight over level ground is 2.1m above any obstacles, which there will hopefully be none/few.

A 100m ethernet/PoE cable will be laid out into the 1st field to the uplink EAP650 of Mesh1.

In theory, each mesh physical location/spread will cover about 125 trade stands, which I would prefer and makes sense to be encompassed by one SSID. I think the EAP650 is rated for 250 client connections per mesh. I've been using the TP-Link heat map tool to get an initial idea about coverage. However, a lot of this is still unknown to me until I start configuring the VLANs, APs, SSID's and done lots of range testing. I'm very keen to see how well the CPE710 bridge performs at 80Mhz - may need to configure tighter rate limits in Mesh2?

One of the bigger issues are Apple phones which love to hunt around for 'open' Wifi signals, this generates a lot of noise in the active wifi bands.  My suggestion is to encrypt and hide (no broadcast) your SSID(s).

That's good to know. For PCI compliance we will be encrypting, and nothing will be "open". Probably going to use captive portal and issue wifi access "vouchers" to provide the traders with dedicated authorisation. I did wonder about hiding SSID's.

Regarding the Omada mesh architecture, be aware that the same 5.8 Wifi channel is used for rx/tx of mesh traffic as well as accepting user traffic from both 5.8 and 2.4 radios.  Given your traffic profiles this is likely less of an issue than most, but my recommendation is still if planning 5xAP mesh (1 root, 4 meshed), it's better to add another AP and make it two sets of (1 root, 2 meshed) and force each set onto a different 5.8 channel.  This also reduces the interference induced when the far left and far right try to talk to the root AP because they can't 'hear' or 'see' each other, they will talk all over each other forcing packet retransmits/loss.  Design your physical layout accordingly.

The problem we have is laying Ethernet cables to AP masts where there is going to be lots of people walking and heavy vehicles moving around the showground. We're having to design the layout around locations of generators, and keeping network cabling costs to minimum (almost as costly as the wifi kit!). The total length of the showground is 1km, with wifi over about 700m!

I am wary of interference and certainly on 2.4Ghz intend to set Channels per group of 5 APs:- eg. 1, 6, 11, 1, 6. I've yet to measure channel use from neighbouring housing estates. Have you tried using the Omada Auto Optimisation feature, is it good?

I thought for 5Ghz it is wiser to choose a least used channel, but I thought it requires the same channel for all APs due to the wireless backhaul? Maybe this is why you're suggesting bridging in the middle of each mesh, to achieve channel x in one half and channel y in other half?

Also because we are unclear of what devices (phones/card readers) the traders will be using (new/old), and they are unlikely to be moving about the showground (they should stay at their stand!), we want to minimise use of advanced tech, e.g. WPA3, roaming, beamforming (not important for an open air site??), and such like. Also mindful of reducing transmit power, and setting sensible Rate Limits (thinking about bored traders waiting for custom, downloading videos, posting on FB/Tik-Tok, lol.) certainly until we get a better idea of how well the system performs.

We've got 2 months for in-the-field testing before July 27/28th, and there's a lot to do! I started on this project in January '24, lol.

Thanks

Jim

  Hi @UKJim 

Re: I hope you don't me responding in your thread? I intend to create a thread of my own for Heckington Show soon. I think both your project and mine have similar problems and discussion points

Please keep posting in this tread - I belive it is smart to keep the experience at few threads, saves much time when hunting around for information! 

My next project will be to establish a wifi network for the local yacht-club in my City. In addition to normal admin / member network, I plan to prepare for video surveilance on our two harbours and will need to establish a radio-link between the harbours over a distanse 600 - 900 meters in a "wifi-polluted" area.. Your experiences will therefore be of high value for me :-). 

With regards to the Auto Optimisation; I have tried it in a low congestion area, and it moved the traffic on both 2.4 and 5GHz to unused channes. I tried to set up a weekly schedule for this functionality, but this functionality seems to have been removed now. 

Based on my amateur radio experience, I would have tried to extend the central cabled  access points as high as possible (maybe a 2x4 on top of a light rig?) to ensure direct sight between them and the antennas they serve. The signal is seriously reduced at distanse even if small objects (ballons, flags...) comes between the two antennas involved. 

You have a very interesting project going, and I look forward to hear your experiences when yor plans has been tried out!

Good luck! 

Odd Erik

  @d0ugmac1 

2nd that

I'm smack in the middle of a TPLink Mesh network and took myself out of the 2.4 / 5ghz wireless loop with Ubiquiti 60Ghz. Superior speed and zero reliability issues.

  @RickJamesBish and @d0ugmac1 

Thank you for providing such a good tip. I've browsed around the internet, and this wireless radiolink seems to be of high quality w.r.t quality and stability. The backup radio on 5Ghz is a good design element! And cost-wise not to bad. 

Q: When setting up such a radio-link. can I conceptionally look at this setup as a "wireless cable" and plug the antennas into a switch on both ends (given that the antennas are in the same ip-range as the switch)? 

  @OddErikD  Yes you can view it as being an invisible cable. One of mine is connected to the network switch, which is connected to the gateway that provides internet to the RV Park. The other one is connected to my own personal router in my camper. 

Hi   @d0ugmac1 

Thanks for your further advice.

I understand about fixing the frequency/channel for the root APs (we don't want Auto changing the foundations if it detects other neighbouring wifi channel conflicts!).

I'm unclear about how or what things to configure to achieve what you suggested.
I figured reducing transmit power so as not to overlap or encroach on other AP's in the same mesh is one way.

Do I also need to lock mesh AP's to the specific Root?

I'm confused about the freq blue/red suggestion? How does the root set two channels/freq to serve each side at once?

The Controller is quite a beast to get my head around, think my brain is about to explode!

Jim