As I feared, the SMs (and probably the APs), do not gracefully recover AT ALL, if there is a power outage during the expiry window…and possible outside of this either.
This basically makes these devices useless in any kind of production environment, if I have to drive around with a mobile hotspot and weird network configuration to get the radio to be able to talk to the AFC.
I have no idea how to work around this either. The only thing that comes to mind is some small secondary SSID on a lower channel as fallback, operating concurrently, to give the SM some form of internet connectivity to be able to check in and transmit.
It might work fine for extremely close SMs in a Lab, which are able to connect at the lower power levels…but if they need the AFC auth to transmit at a higher power, they never connect, hence no internet, hence no check in.
Not sure; storm took out power for a long time (which happened to be on top of the window for the AFC check-in for the AP), the links didnt come back up. The AP site was recently upgraded with a huge stack of batteries, so it never powered off, but due to the power outages, it didnt have an internet connection to the AFC. Don’t know exactly what caused what, but the AP refused to transmit/ the radio was listed “off”. I went onsite since this is all kind of “new” stuff so I could physically test and see everything. Once i plugged the AP into my hotspot (which has an ethernet port) and rebooted the AP it started transmitting but the SM never connected. I drove to it and did the same, and the link came back up.
this sounds odd! SM without AFC connect should transmit 6dB lower then AP. So be able to connect at least on low MCS to retrieve AFC data for higher EIRP levels.
Did you have a chance to see what is going on the SM side?
I suggest you to Raise Ticket in the top right corner of this page. Attach techsupport files from AP and SM when they don’t form a link. Our engineer will try to isolate you issue!