I’m renting an apartment with zero ethernet access, so I’m stuck using the landlord’s Wi-Fi. I bought a hAP ax3 to use as a bridge. Set up the 5GHz radio in station mode to grab the apartment Wi-Fi, and built my own local 2.4GHz network behind it. It worked perfectly for two weeks, but yesterday the 5GHz link just dropped and won’t come back up. The SSID is still there in the scan list, but the Tik just sits there trying to connect forever.
Reboots and disabling the WLAN interface did nothing. The logs aren’t showing any helpful error messages either.Also, a few days ago the 2.4GHz side went weird — devices would connect but couldn’t pull an IP via DHCP. I had to wipe the config and restore it from a backup to fix it. Is this typical RouterOS v7 jank, a hardware issue, or did the landlord’s router likely block my MAC/change something on their end? How do I even debug this properly before I give up and return the box?
First rule of MikroTik: never trust your own config. RouterOS lets you build a totally broken setup that works for a week and then suddenly falls apart. When you get it working again, make sure to save a full backup immediately.
Check what channel the landlord AP moved to.
If you can see the BSSID, try locking the station to the exact BSSID instead of only SSID. Also make sure country/installation settings are sane, because allowed channels depend on that. But yeah, my money is on DFS or channel list mismatch.
@fastridegeartim You were right, it was the channel list. I ran a scan with NetSpot and saw the landlord/ISP SSID had moved to a DFS channel. I had DFS channels disabled on the MikroTik because I thought I didn’t need them. Enabled them again and 5 GHz connected immediately. So not a dead hAP ax3, just me blocking the channel the upstream AP decided to use. I’ll make a backup of this working config now before I break it again lol.