I recently moved house, to a property that is substantially bigger than my previous one. It quickly became apparent, that my collection of Vigor 2860n and ISP-supplied Fritz!boxs, Huawei's etc were not going to do the job ... at least, not if I wanted to keep my VLAN structure in place.

So I bit the bullet, purchased a Vigor AP903 and a single Vigor AP802 to go with it. (I thought I'd need more than one of the latter, but it turns out I don't). I initially tried both of them as straight Access Points, and was very impressed with the coverage they achieved. The AP903 is capable of covering 95% of the house all by itself - even the AP802, given its compact size, is pretty good.

Then, it was on to this new-fangled meshing business...

This made it sound very easy:

To set up new Mesh Nodes, simply have the Mesh Root search for new Mesh Nodes. When they're detected, give each VigorAP a name and the VigorMesh system will set up each VigorAP to join into the VigorMesh network.

and so it proved - a basic network came up, as if by magic.

Now, on to the VLAN-tagging, and the multiple SSID stuff. Again a Draytek guide seemed to provide all the information I needed. However, before I got stuck into the serious tests, I noticed that 'something' was hogging a large chunk of the 5GHz band, and since this overlapped the channels my setup had defaulted to, I thought I'd better do some re-configuration. (It turns out that the 'something' was actually my Sky Q box - but I actually thought it was my neighbour's Sky Broadband (and I was stuck with it) :oops: (In my defence, I've never had Sky TV before, nor have I ever used 5GHz wifi :lol: )

It took a little while to get to grips with all this DFS/Radar detection stuff on 5GHz. The AP903 kept saying it had "detected Radar" - which I simply didn't believe. It turns out that you can live in the middle of nowhere and have a NATS Radar installation 10miles away on the next hill top

Anyway, when I finally found a 5GHz channel that was Sky Q and Radar free, I configured the AP903 to use that and continued with my 'mesh tests'.

At this point, it was obvious that something was very wrong. I could see from Syslog that the AP903 checked the 5GHz channel for radar at every boot - which involved a TEN minute startup delay. This seemed unnecessary and was exceedingly annoying - but I was yet to realise how badly this going to affect the AP802 mesh-node configuration...

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You would expect (well I did), that in mesh-mode, there would be nothing configurable on the AP802; after all, it's supposed to receive its configuration from the Mesh-root. That turned out not to be the case; not only can you still configure it, in some cases you have to configure it!

With the latest firmwares from the Draytek UK site, many parameters do not transfer between mesh-root and mesh-node. (There is later firmware on the International site that improves matters - but it doesn't fix it completely).

The major issue with this, is that as you tweak the AP802 to match the AP903, its usual response, is to restart the Wifi, thus breaking the mesh. When it restarts, the AP802 will repeat that 'Radar Check', if you've specified an affected channel!. (The mesh-node seems to use the same channel, as that used by the mesh-root, which I find surprising - but it just overrides any attempts at deviation).

The problem with this strategy, is that when you click "OK" to apply a config. update to the AP802, it falls off the network for ten minutes. I have at least four such changes to apply - meaning the total configuration time is actually forty+ minutes :?:

Worst of all, when you don't realise what it's doing, you just think it's seriously broken. I've been ready to package this lot up and send it back whence it came, on several occasions in the past two weeks!

To my mind, the AP903 should apply the Radar check ONCE, when first selected and the AP802 shouldn't do it at all, when operating in mesh mode (as it's already been done).

Failing to fully transfer the configuration between mesh-root and mesh-node is a bug. Compounding that with the mesh node playing dead for forty minutes would try anyone's patience!

During the ten minutes when the mesh is broken and the 5GHz WiFi unavailable, the 2.4GHz radio is still up and running as normal. The AP802 still allows clients to connect - but of course, with no mesh network in place, they don't work.

I'll let Draytek know what I think ;-)