374.43 - Couple of quick questions

[stook1]

Hi Everyone,

I just installed the Merlin 374.43 fork on my new TMobile Cell Spot (ie. Asus RT-AC68U). I have a couple of quick questions that, for whatever reason, were not completely obvious to me but probably should be.

- I'm looking to get better range on both 2.4ghz and 5ghz without sacrificing throughput. How high can I jack up the broadcast power before throughput starts to degrade?

- I noticed the note on the UI for the broadcast power setting that one's region effectively dictates/caps the setting regardless of the value one enters. Is there a separate region setting somewhere that I didn't notice that needs to be adjusted so that I have full control over the broadcast power setting?

- This is my first foray into AC. I have a mix of AC and N devices. For performance reasons, would it be advisable to run only AC devices on the AC router (ie. kind of like avoiding B/G mixed mode on N)? I do have an RT-N66U that I could easily deploy for the regular N devices if necessary.

- I setup a guest 2.4ghz network, which is something that I haven't done in the past. How does this work from a wireless perspective? Is it running on the same channel as my main 2.4ghz network? I didn't see a way to assign a channel for it and I want to make sure it doesn't cause any interference since I don't expect it will be used often.

- I also noticed that there is an option to overclock the router. What is the benefit of doing this? I assume that this just improves routing performance, in which case, for my purposes, I probably don't need it. Also, I noticed that the setting seems to be incompatible with my bootloader.

Many thanks for any assistance!

 

[L&LD]

On the firmware that allowed setting the power, the best setting for myself and customers was at 200mW. The router still decides what power to actually use. This setting just allows it to use more if needed.

If you can have a dedicated router for each class of devices, that should give the best performance for all devices, yes. Especially when they're used at the same time.

With each additional ssid network you add on the same channel (and the channel is not adjustable), you decrease your signal by 2 or 3 dBi. If you don't need it, keep it disabled.

If you're connecting a USB drive or running VPN then overclocking could be useful. Don't forget to add a fan to the router to keep it cool and proceed carefully so that you don't brick it.

 

[stook1]

Thanks, I just read a bunch of threads about the signal strength and region settings. This doesn't seem like it will have a big impact for me, regardless. I'll try it out, even if just to enable the additional channels with the EU or GB region settings.

I have no need for overclocking but thank you for the heads up about why this is used.