Anyone add an XT-9 to an existing XT-8 Ai Mesh?

[NorVanWifi]

Hi Everyone, before my question I want to thank everyone for all their help, I'm fairly new dealing with complex mesh systems.

I have a fairly large 3 story house (5,700 sqft) with a lot of walls, glass, and cement separating the different areas of the house, in addition to a separate outdoor office located 30 feet away from the main router. I've slowly added nodes to get coverage in all areas of the house, and have one main AX-8 plus four additional AX-8's acting as nodes. I'm running Merlin firmware and using a dedicated 5 GHz wireless backhaul for the nodes vs. ethernet. I've occasionally had some issues with the wireless backhaul moving to 2.4 GHz out of the blue, but moving to the Merlin firmware has seemed to help.

I'm now using the back corner of my basement more often and the signal there is very weak in comparison to the rest of the house. I wanted to add another node to boost the signal in that area, and it seems the only models available now are the XT-9's, XT-8's for sale are two packs which I don't need or are more expensive. Question - is it worth replacing my current XT-8 Home router that connects to my modem with the XT-9 as it's a newer model with better output? Or will it not make that much of a difference and I should just add the XT-9 as an additional node to the current setup? The XT-8's don't have the 160 GHz frequency that I've read is better for wireless backhaul and I'm not sure if there is any advantage to the XT-9 having that and connecting to the XT-8 nodes that way? Trying to figure out if it's worth resetting and redoing everything because I will now have an XT-9. Thanks so much for your help!

 

[paul85eng]

Personally i would put the xt9 as the main router.

I think it has slightly better cpu and as the main router probably does the most work makes sense to have your best device doing that job.

I dont think much else is different and as for the backhaul radio you will have to match settings or the devices wouldn't be able to communicate.

I am not an expert though and suspect any gains would be minimal.

 

[glens]

The XT-8's don't have the 160 GHz frequency that I've read is better for wireless backhaul and I'm not sure if there is any advantage to the XT-9 having that and connecting to the XT-8 nodes that way?

The only "160" the XT9 has that the XT8 doesn't is on the 5-1 radio, as a result of the XT9 having DFS channels enabled for that radio. The XT8 can only bond 80MHz of channels on 5-1. Other than that there should be no discernible difference. The 5 GHz backhaul is via the better 5-2 radio which should be the same for both models.

If you use an XT9 as a mesh node to a controlling XT8 I doubt that 5-1 160 MHz channel bonding will even be available on the 9 since the 8 doesn't know anything about it, thus cannot direct it. And if the 9 is the controller with the 8 as a node, either the mesh's "AI" could effectively disable the 5-1 radio on the 8 by picking a control channel the 8 doesn't have, or the "160" will be unavailable even on the controlling 9 since the 8 can't do that and "mesh" uses the same radio settings for all meshed units. Or at least so it seems.

 

[PureSpeed]

So the difference between the the two is very slight. The XT9 has a marginal faster cpu speed difference and available 160 channel width on the 5.1 band it really wouldn’t matter much how you set them. The differences are very small. The XT9 is what the original idea for the XT8 was supposed to be but Asus made the XT9 instead of a firmware update to give us the 160 channel width on the 5.1 band for the XT8