XT12 with XT8 (maybe XT9)

[KenKong]

Hello, I am running three XT12's in a large stick frame/drywall ranch out in the woods. I have a semi-dead zone out in the 3rd & 4th bays of my attached garage. My coach light smart bulbs are constantly dropping connection. DBM hovers around -90 or worse when they are getting signal, according to the app. RX/TX is set to Performance. I set up an old XT8 that I had laying around with AiMesh and set the uplink to the closest node, which fixed the weak signal issue but caused another problem. This system has been rock solid from day 1 (11 months now) with zero down time. I have Spectrum Gig & I get full isp speed out of the router and both nodes 99% of the time running fully wireless 5G-2 backhaul with 160 Mhz, DFS, U-NII-4 all enabled. There is zero other WiFi traffic in the area, no radar/airport, etc. .

The problem is when I add the XT8 to the mesh, all of my XT12's revert to 80Mhz backhaul. I've read here & elsewhere that XT8 will not provision 160Mhz fronthaul out of the box but the backhaul should use the 160Mhz. Is this correct? Not only will the XT8 not use 160Mhz backhaul on 5G-2 band, it causes my router & nodes to revert to 80Mhz backhaul. As soon as I remove the XT8 & reboot the system, it's back to 160Mhz & back to my uber fast speeds. All of this has been verified with WiFi Analyzer app.

Why does the XT8 cause this? Is it because I'm using a node as the uplink instead of the main router? Unfortunately, the XT8 does not get a strong enough signal out in the garage to uplink the main router (yellow LED=Weak signal), however, it gets a great signal from the closest node that I set the uplink to (-60 DBM).

I have access to a used & extremely cheap six month old XT9. Would this be worth trying? The XT9 should use 160Mhz out of the box for front & backhaul, correct? Would another XT12 do the trick if uplinking to a node?

Thank you in advance for any feedback.

 

[Dd852]

I too had trouble trying to use an xt8 node on a 12 network. In my case it kept on going down. I think the 8 is simply an underpowered processor, which is the reason I upgraded to a 12 in the first place. So I can’t answer the questions you asked, but I wanted to share my similar experience

 

[coxhaus]

You be better off chasing a small business solution with multiple wireless APs.

 

[KenKong]

Yes, I understand wiring everything and doing enterprise AP's may be a better system than what I have.

But your answer does not address the questions at hand. Thanks for your time though.

Is there anyone here that has an answer or can help with the questions at hand? I am not interested in starting over, running wires, buying all new equipment.

Thanks
K