RouterBOARD Wireless Hardware

What it is

A wireless RouterBOARD is a small router board that carries one or more radios, running RouterOS.

MikroTik sells these boards in many shapes. Some are indoor home access points, some are outdoor enclosures with a built-in antenna, and some are bare boards with expansion slots.

All of them run the same operating system, so the wireless commands you learn apply across the range. The hardware decides what the radio can do, and where you can place the device.

How it works

The board, the radio, the power source and the housing together set what an installation can do.

Integrated radios and slots

Many boards have the radio soldered on, together with an internal antenna or antenna connectors. Other boards have miniPCI or miniPCIe slots, so you choose the wireless card yourself. Slots give flexibility, and they let you swap a card when a standard or a band changes.

A board can carry more than one radio. A dual band device often has one radio for 2.4 GHz and a second one for 5 GHz. Each radio appears as its own interface, such as wlan1 and wlan2.

Connectors and antennas

The radio reaches the antenna through a cable and a connector. Small boards often use tiny connectors that are easy to damage. Outdoor devices often use larger connectors on a pigtail or a bulkhead.

Some devices have the antenna built into the case, so the whole unit is aimed at the far side. Others have connectors for an external antenna, so you can choose gain and pattern. Every cable and connector adds loss, which is covered in the antenna pages.

Power

Wireless boards are very often powered through the Ethernet cable, so the device can sit on a mast with no mains socket nearby. PoE (Power over Ethernet) comes in more than one flavour, and the power supply must match the device. Some boards accept a DC jack as well.

A weak or long power cable is a common cause of a device that reboots when the radio transmits at full power. Always check the supported input range before you choose an injector.

Housing and environment

Outdoor devices come in weatherproof cases. They need protection from water and lightning, which means grounding and shielded cable on a tall mast. Indoor boards are not built for these conditions.

Temperature range also matters. A device in a roof cabinet in summer can overheat, which makes the radio unstable.

Reading the hardware from the console

You can identify the board and its wireless parts without opening the case. The wireless commands in this guide use the /interface wireless menu of RouterOS v6 and the classic wireless package.

/system routerboard print
/system resource print
/interface wireless print
/interface wireless info hw-info wlan1

• /system routerboard print shows the model and firmware.
• /system resource print shows the CPU, memory and architecture.
• /interface wireless print lists each radio as an interface.
• /interface wireless info hw-info wlan1 shows what that radio supports, for example its chains and ranges.

Choosing hardware for a job

Match the device to the task rather than buying the biggest unit:

The CPU matters too. A busy device that routes, filters and bridges a lot of traffic needs more processing power than a simple bridge.