hAP ac lite Dual-concurrent Access Point (RB952Ui-5ac2nD-US)

This is a great little router / AP for its price point and for what I needed. My main WiFi AP at home is an old EnGenius EAP 1200 which covers our 2-story for most of devices. But lately we've purchased several 'smart' devices like cameras, garage door opener, robo-vac, smart switches, etc. and some of them have pretty pathetic WiFi antennas in them. So I bought this to help them out. Pros: * It has RouterOS and is super-configurable. Multi SSIDs, decent firewall rules, all the standard RouterOS stuff. It has some nice setup wizards for non-tech folks, but for a tech person, you can't get better than this unless you go expensive enterprise. Period. * Despite not having a "real" antenna (just the in-box one), it easily covers about 1000 sq ft of our downstairs plus the garage. Cons: * It's only 100Mbit. But I don't need anything better for our stupid IoT devices. * No WiFi-6. But I don't need that either because I'm not watching 4K video on my robo-vac. * The processor will be weak if you want to do more sophisticated firewall rules like packet inspection. So buy a higher model if you want that.

Small and light. Without it off-the shelf firmware, it's a home access point, whether connected through its own Ethernet LAN or Wifi, I can connect to the home network through my ISP router. For AREDN home use, I configured it for IP tunneling through Internet. I can connect to my home network and the tunnel at the same time. Just after getting it and installing AREDN firmware, I took it out to a field site to test POE radios on top of a water tower. That one time alone justified purchasing it. I plugged the POE power into its Ethernet input jack (it can use unpowered LAN input with 24 volt wall adaptor), then plugged each radio one by one into the Ethernet output jack (can switch 24 volt POE output on or off through a web-browser). It worked great and saved me the hassle of needing separate POE injector.

I use hAP ac lites in the Amateur Radio Service. It has amazing capability for what you pay for it. It won't do everything that big routers do, but for my application, it is nearly perfect. The RouterOS documentation is available on line, and has lots of details.

I have a few ROUTERBOARD's. I bought this small access point for POE use on the 5ghz band. I would highly recommend it. My multiple computers were crowding the 2.4ghz band. Granted we have run CAT5E; but 3 laptops and 2 phones were taking up to the WIFI. This little box allows us to stream FLAC audio (5-6mb/s) nicely. We are lucky to have fiber to the home; so our GB switch handles the big traffic and this just get plugs into our POE. I don't know if I'd recommend it to anyone who isn't willing to read the instuctions but it is very simple compared to our other switches and things.

They have a quick setup and then the need-a-university-degree setup. It would be nice if there were a middle ground ... something between megacomplex and simple. None the less, I got my university degree and it's fun what you can do with this device. In fact I wrote a bunch of software to help me with that middle ground, which is why I know the device could benefit from it.

Works great!

Received as ordered.

I wanted to create a node on the ARDEN mesh network for Ham radio. I purchased this device and after following the online tutorials I was able to reflash the firmware for AREDN Mesh network. I now have my node connected to the mesh network via IP tunneling for the backbone. This allows me to experiment with the ARDEN network before investing more money in a 2 Ghz antenna to place on my roof. The device is ready to support the antenna when I purchase it. One of the ports on this device provides POE through a ethernet cable up to the 2Ghz antenna when I install it.