I wanted to do one of these in the lab and make sure I hit any of the snags in the warmth rather than trying to deal with it on my cell phone 250' up in 10* weather. It's nice this hardware supports the same POE as Ubnt, at least enough to keep downtime minimal.
One big thing to worry about is this does NOT work for Force 110 PTP/lite AP licenses. The hardware works, but you'll need a full AP upgrade key + entitlement keys. It doesn't matter if you want 1 elevate CPE or more. My test CPE was XW 5.6.6 Beam5 400
I thought about updating all the CPEs first, then climbing and replacing the AP. This would ensure that I have access to them and am not dependant on WiFi mode. I'm hoping this won't be necessary, but it is a thought I had and thought I'd bring discussion to it.
Epmp Elevate
Proposed steps
buy all licenses, put on new ePMP ap
put ePMP AP in WiFi mode, match SSID and WPA key from AirOS AP
replace AP hardware, customers should associate at this point doing Wifi
Use XM or XW epmp 3.2 software to CPEs - needs done manually at this point
after flashing CPEs change AP, see below section
Beam5 config after epmp flash
tdd mode scans all 5/10/20/40 mhz channels
auto power, 25 dbi gain
device name carried from Airos
network may be carried over from Airos - nat, dhcp wlan, lan ip from airos
security has radius/wpa2 Cam39-Tai!wdmv but NOT open
Changing AP from Wifi to TDD
purchase entitlement, generate license key off ethernet mac
It's a bummer that the Lite AP can't work for this. I have a stack of them and was planning on pairing them with omnis as temporary APs to get things cut over.
I guess I'll have to take another approach, it isn't worth the extra $$$ to upgrade them to full units when they won't be needed after the transition anyway.
That's good to know about the LiteAP issue... I wonder if that's a bug or if it's intentional? I don't think Cambium ever mentioned it...
Those are pretty much the same steps I came up with, and that seems to be the best way to do it with the least down time (aside from running two APs simultaniously, which isn't going to be an option in a lot of cases). We tried using WiFi mode to convert a couple APs last year, and it worked well enough to keep everything working until we could get out there to swap the CPE, except for the fact that none of the XW radios would pass any traffic (XM radios worked fine)... but I'm hoping that was just because I didn't have WDS enabled.