Recently, I picked up a MikroTik wAP ax access point because I wanted something that is not UniFi. Out of the box, the 5 GHz Wi-Fi was not visible to most devices at my place including a Pixel 3a, iPhones, and ThinkPads. On the other hand, my Pixel 7a connected without issue. Strange …
Since I am not a professional when it comes to Wi-Fi and its adjacent fields, a lot of time was spent troubleshooting through trial and error. It turned out that the access point selected channels such as channel 177 (5885 MHz) which appears to be outside the range of these devices’ Wi-Fi chips. Using the List of WLAN channels, I configured the interface’s channel frequency to 5160-5785 (MHz).
Although I used WebFig, here is the terminal command to set channel.frequency. My 5 GHz Wi-Fi interface is wifi2.
/interface/wifi/set [ find default-name=wifi2 ] channel.frequency=5160-5765Here is the interface configuration for reference (the following code block might need to be copy/pasted into your editor of choice for easier viewing)
> /interface/wifi/print detail where name=wifi2
Flags: M - master; D - dynamic; B - bound; X - disabled, I - inactive, R - running
1 M BR default-name="wifi2" name="wifi2" l2mtu=1560 mac-address=BE:EE:EE:EE:EE:EF arp-timeout=auto radio-mac=BE:EE:EE:EE:EE:EF
configuration.mode=ap .ssid="beef" .country=United States
security.authentication-types=wpa2-psk,wpa3-psk .passphrase="beeeeeeeeeef" .wps=disable .ft=yes .ft-over-ds=yes
channel.frequency=5160-5765 .skip-dfs-channels=all