Force 300 SM radios not seeing non-AC access points

[Malessa]

Hello, We have been slowly upgrading our access points from ePMP 2000 to ePMP 3000. We are also upgrading customer radios to the Force 300 series. We have noticed the Force 300 radios will find and connect to some of the ePMP 2000 access points but not all of them.

Example: We have a SE facing ePMP 2000 and we have a N facing ePMP 2000. When we upgrade a customer on the SE AP to an F300 radio the radio will only show the N facing AP in the wireless scan list.

We have checked the settings on both the AP radios and all settings match up. We are currently using 4.5.6 firmware on these AP’s and customer radios. We have been changing customers back to the F180/F200 radios to get them back on the correct AP.

Anyone else run into this issue and have any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[Fedor]

It might be related to the fact that F300s radios have slightly smaller frequencies range for scanning comparing to F190/180 because of extra FCC limitation for 802.11ax standard.

Please check if it matches with what you see:

Force 300-19 Scan list

5750 is the lowest i'm allowed to set on a 2k AP using 40Mhz channels. It's also the lowest that CPE's will scan for. I should of clarified that it's not as if5740 used to be an option on 3k equipment and now its not - but that if you're swapping force 200 CPE with a force 300CPE and the AP is on 5740 at 20Mhz then you won't get it  to reconnect. This is FCC.

Thank you.

[brubble1]

So if the AC radio is operating as an N radio are they not allowed to use the larger frequency range ?

[Eric_Ozrelic]

Correct. Regardless of N or AC operation, AP or SM operation, the AC radios have a slightly smaller range of channels they’re certified for.

[Malessa]

Thank you all so much for the information. We have changed the frequency on the APs we were seeing this issue on and we are now able to see the correct AP on the F300 radio.

[fgoldstein]

That’s one reason I’ve stuck with 2000-series (and F200) radios. It’s more important to have frequency flexibility than the ability to use MCS 8 and 9 on the occasional really strong link. Cambium has been really weak in its ePMP-series FCC approvals, not even authorizing the PTP550 to do anything useful, and limiting the -ac radios to the popular, noisy channels is part of the problem. Whether this is intentional or if the -ac chips are just too sloppy is a different question.