Issues connecting a 450i SM to a 450m AP

I was wondering if someone else is having the same issues as I am, and if there is a fix for it.

We updated all out towers from 450i AP’s to 450m AP’s a few years ago. When we did this some of the remote SM’s didn’t come back up right away but some did. The one’s that didn’t took 30 min to sometimes 2 hours to connect back up.

Let’s fast forward to recently.
We were upgrade a SM location with a new structure and we added a new 450i to it. Same config same firmware as the pervious SM on the old structure. That SM wouldn’t link up would’t even show any 450m AP’s in the Evaluation. But we could see the AP by using the Aiming mode.
Once the radio was aligned using Aiming mode, we turned it off and went ahead and rebooted the SM still nothing in the AP Evaluation and not connected in the AP. We went ahead and put the old 450i and it connected right up no issue.

This has happened many times before where we can align a SM using the aiming mode and then leave it turn up follow back the next day and the SM is connected to AP like it should.

We are running firmware 21.1 on both AP’s and SM’s

Has anyone else ran into this issue and if so, what was done to resolve it?

Thank you

I don’t believe we’ve ever seen this issue and I have not seen this come up in the forums here.

Any reason why you’re not using the newest recommended release R22.1.2?

Is this for 3GHz/CBRS or 5GHz?

This has been an issue for a while. We just haven’t updated them all to 22.1.2 yet. We are doing 5Ghz

Plus, this has been going on for a while even when we had everything running at 20.0.1 it was still doing the same thing.

Instead of copying the old radio’s config to the new radio, have you tried just entering in the config by hand to see if it makes a difference? Perhaps there’s something in the old config that does not agree with or is being lost with the new radios?

1 Like

Yes we have done that also.

The only thing I can think of is that you’re trying to use a PTP450i 5GHz radio as an SM. What is the model number of the SM that would not connect?

we were using the following model number C050045C002C

That seems like a regular PtMP SM model from what I can tell. Well, I’m out of ideas. I think the next step would be to update to the newest stable release (R22.1.2) and then if it’s still having issues, file a support ticket with Cambium.