I am trying to bypass the BlueBoat base station in favor of a stronger router / antenna combo that my lab currently uses. For the most part I have it working, in the sense that I was able to reconfigure the pi running blueos to send data to a different ip and have a solid connection etc. I then switched from a generic router to our lab’s high powered antenna and now the boat seems to disconnect from the network at almost regular intervals… I am having a hard time understanding if this is a hardware issue (ex wrong antenna gains) or a software issue (being kicked off the network for not having the IP addresses configured correctly)
Here is a link to the current status as portrayed via WinBox:
Hi @jwenger -
When you experience these drop-outs, are your two radios in very close proximity? Sometimes bandwidth at high RF power can suffer at short ranges - just like having a conversation with two people screaming in a small room full of echoes!
While your radios may perform better, it is likely possible to achieve the same performance with the default radios - simply by configuring them to have an antenna gain of 0, and the region set to unitedstates3 on both. We’ve recently updated the instructions to cover this, but if you’re not in the US/Canada the settings may be above what is legal for your region.
The best solution for range anxiety is definitely using a cellular modem with the BlueBoat! We will have a kit for that eventually, but in the meantime it is possible to DIY without much trouble.
This is less a desire for a stronger radio and more of a need to get our blue boat functioning in an identical manner as our other robots for ease of integration in multi agent operations. What I have discovered is that the connecting, disconnecting behavior is only an issue when the security of the our rocket radio is turned on. It would seem there is a mismatch in the security profiles between the two routers… still trying to confirm.
What client devices are in the other robots? I’d be surprised if the Mikrotik could interoperate with the Ubiquiti Rocket radios. Those radios (depending on mode) are very timing sensitive which is why the include GNSS receivers.
Ultimately, I had to erase all settings on the mikrotik and create my own configuration. For some reason starting from scratch, only creating a network bridge and configuring my own routing / DHCP servers did the trick
