Can anyone comment on real-world improvement at a site, e.g. where you previously didn’t have the smart antenna installed then you upgraded and installed the smart antenna?
Well, on AC radios the smart antenna hasn’t worked at all for most of the firmware versions. So it’s been just like not having the antenna , then you have the antenna, then you don’t. On top of that , even when it’s “technically working” I can’t say that I noticed any difference at all but there is no way I know of to determine if the antenna just doesn’t really do much or if current firmware is still borking it. Since you ask though I went and looked at ours. Currently running 4.6.1 on everything and of the 3 sectors I have with the “smart” antenna only one of them shows it working while the other two show they don’t have one when they do…
So anyway, looking at a radio that was using the “smart” antenna on uplink it had -49 RSSI , 39 SNR , MCS 7 (it’s an F180 N radio so 7 is as good as it gets) and unrestricted uplink speed was 21Mbps (ran it several times, always around that).
So I forced that radio to the sector antenna (which forces the radio drop/reconnect without telling you it’s going to do that but you’re use to it because everything requires ePMP to drop/reboot/reconnect…) Anywho, radio reconnected using sector… nothing changed a single dB or Mbps there was absolutely no detectable difference other than it was using the sector now.
Now I have one AP using DFS channels so the client radios don’t get extra transmit power there so the uplink RSSI / SNR is not nearly as good as non-dfs radios but since that AP is currently claiming it doesn’t have “smart” antenna I can’t test it.
I also can’t tell you how much noise the one that does acknowledge its smart antenna is possibly dealing with because the SA is pretty useless/unreliable…