Yesterday I attempted to link two Ubiquiti Lite AP units, one at my home and the other at my WISP office, but couldn’t get them to connect. I tested both ends, using wireless and LAN connections. While I could access the Lite AP interface through the LAN port and tweak several settings like frequency, bandwidth, modulation, and data rate, I never managed to detect the SSID. The home device was configured as an Access Point (AP) and the office one as a Station, both in PTP mode. I even tried disabling PTP and adjusting distance mode, yet nothing worked. I also experimented with dynamic and static IP addresses, but the issue persisted. Despite perfect antenna alignment, I spent hours troubleshooting without success. Even this morning, scanning showed plenty of nearby 5GHz SSIDs—but not mine.
To make matters worse, I faced a similar issue with another PowerBeam and LiteBeam point-to-point(PtP) setup. This link was meant to span 7.4 km from my office tower to a remote village. I had configured the LiteBeam beforehand and tested it with the PowerBeam successfully, but once installed in the village, it failed to detect the PowerBeam’s SSID from the office tower.
Frustrated, I switched to using TP-Link CPE510 radios for my office-to-home internet link. Surprisingly, they connected smoothly without any problems. The CPE510 at the office, shown in picture below, had been installed earlier, and I added the home unit yesterday when the Lite AP 5AC link failed.
From my experience, Ubiquiti radios stand out for their higher data rates, flexible modulation options (QAM, QPSK, etc.), adjustable transmit power, frequency settings, and detailed throughput monitoring. However, reliability has been a recurring problem. Out of my six Ubiquiti devices—one LiteBeam, two PowerBeams, and three Lite APs—every Lite AP has required repairs, with one permanently failing. One PowerBeam also stopped working, reportedly due to a transformer failure in the village that caused its adapter to blink continuously.
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WISP
