Review on 🔁 MikroTik hAP ac2 RBD52G-5HacD2HnD-TC Dual-Band Access Point, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, 5 x Gigabit Ethernet Ports by Scott Mauri

About me: I don't consider myself very network savvy. I also acknowledge that there are technical things in this world that are really too hard to use, like setting up legacy sound in Arch Linux. A few years ago, I installed a Wi-Fi bridge in my parents' TV room. I used a pair of dlink ethernet-over-power outlets to connect the ethernet from her wired internet box to the outlet in her TV room, then used the Netgear Nighthawk setup in bridged mode to power my network over wireless transfer and they also connected . television sets. A few days ago, Nighthawk started distorting the network, the 5g connection died, and resetting the settings did nothing. So time for a new router. I've seen good things about Mikrotik, but also that their "router" line was really hard to set up. I ordered this hap ac2 because it was cheap and got good reviews. I set it up tonight and will echo what others have said: I've used Winbox and had a great installation experience. Took me about 35 minutes without reading any instructions. first thing. Bridges are sometimes difficult to set up. Typically, bridge configurations are designed to be invisible on the network. So when you set up the bridge and click Apply. connection is often no longer possible. With this device I connected to a mikrotik application called winbox. I've heard people complain about this, but I find it amazing. It finds mikrotik routers and connects to them using their mac address (the static hardware identifier of the machine). This means that you can see and configure it as a bridge even after activating the device. So I was set up to create bridge interfaces and add devices to the bridge, but at the top of the winbox window there is a "quick set" that sets up the device in several useful ways. I chose the "PTP Bridge Access Point" setting. My network named. Device password provided. Wi-Fi protection and password enabled. Finally, I went to the IP/DHCP server and disabled DHCP (the main router in the house uses DHCP). At this point I rebooted the device and connected it to my main router. I saw the Wi-Fi network I created, joined it and Winbox was able to reconnect. Likewise. The internet worked. A little weird part of the setup. The quick access page only configured the 5GHz network, leaving another Wi-Fi network called Mikrotik at 2.4GHz. I went to wifi, clicked on wlan2 and renamed this wifi network. It has already been configured to use the same security and password as the 5GHz network. Finally. I "upgraded" the firmware on the device using the speed dial/upgrade button. It failed with a DNS error. The device wants to contact a Microtik server somewhere and I didn't give it a DNS server or even an IP address, so of course the DNS failed. I looked up Mikrotik's IP address on my computer and then created a custom DNS entry: upgrade.mikrotik.com 13.33.44.253. After that the update was successful and I deactivated my DNS entry. Although there were a few odd things, I actually found that to be the case. The entire installation process must be extremely professional. It is important for me that after these settings everything worked. I wish I had tried to make more of it.