N/G at 2.5 and 5GHZ possible?

chris.kemper

Long time DD-WRT, new PFSENSS user (pfsense store SG-2440 with Wireless add-on).
I have the N/G setup and working over the 2.5 spectrum.
I see that I can also setup N/A over the 5.0 spectrum.
Can I setup both the N/G at 2.5 and N/A over the 5.0 to work at the same? Will this require 1 or 2 SSIDs?
If not, can I order a second WiFi card for the N/A network?
Thanks Crew.

dotdash

I'm pretty sure the card you have has a single radio capable of running on 2.5 or 5GHz, not both at the same time.
If you've got another pcie slot free, and enough antenna knockouts, you could add another card. I personally wouldn't want to run two radios right next to each other, I would put in a stand alone AP for the second band. You can use the same ssid across bands if you wish.

cmb

Each radio can only do 2.4 or 5 GHz, not both at the same time. If you add a second radio, you can do 2.4 on one and 5 GHz on the other. You can use the same SSID on both if you want, personally I put different ones on 5 GHz to ensure things that are capable of 5 GHz are only connecting there (lot of 2.4 GHz noise and relatively slow performance where I am).

shaqan

Atheros cards may be hardware locked. Client/AP capable on "G" band but work only as clients on 5GHz "A" band. Lock would be imposed trough card's EEPROM. Patchable often enough (for AR9280/928X cards at least) but you risk bricking your card in the process. Anyway, single card can do only one band as AP, not several at once. You would need several cards for AP on several bands.

chris.kemper

Thanks crew - I have an email out to the pfsense store in regards to a 2nd card.

Like CMB I have a good deal on interference on the 2.4 band… BUT the household also has a few devices that can only connect via G.

Thanks Chris i didn't realize that both cards could share an SSID. Would this be as simple as assigning the same SSID to the wireless config of each modules/interface?

parsed to keep on topic

chris.kemper

@phish. I am new to the pfsense game. Currently I am awaiting response from the PFSense Store in regards to purchasing a 2nd WiFi card so I am not able to test.

I have a dual ath0 setup and run 2.4 and 5ghz on different SSID's. Each has a static IP and dhcp server on each interface. All works well.

So i tried both modules/interface with simply the same SSID. Was able to connect via client and promply disconnected due to dhcp error. It seems like I may need to bridge the two modules so i can run a static IP on the bridge and a dhcp server on the bridge as well.

Two static ip's on the same ssid. I knew that was not good…Especially with dhcp servers on both.

Thanks CMB.
Got her going with the wifi bridging of the two interfaces.
Sweet

My Vizio on the same ssid as everything else in my world.

I ended up going back to seperate SSID's on my test rig. Seems connection speeds dropped back a good bit. So tried to tweak and I found all my wireless devices were using OPT1/BGN and nothing on OPT2/ABGN. So i swapped ABGN to OPT1 and that helped with some. I also went to my Windows device manager and forced wifi to use 5ghz. That worked OK but still slow connection speeds all over. descided to revert back to original setup.
Still nice proof of concept. It does work. If you were using it for a sensor net or something low bandwidth it would work fine.