UNIFI Beacon HD will NOT stay connected

To preface this, its very possible that I am idiot.

Now to the issue.

I have a small setup in a historic building that is a business below and the owners of the business live upstairs. Internet comes in on the 1st floor so I have pfSense giving vlans to a unifi switch to split out a business wifi, guest wifi, POS wifi and the personal wifi for the family upstairs.

The building is historic meaning cant really run cable and weird walls mess with signal so I added a Beacon HD to the “apartment” on the 2nd floor for more signal. It meshes back to a AP 6-LR downstairs which is the main AP for everything else. Signal is perfectly fine but the Beacon HD constantly disconnects or goes isolated. I think the record for it staying connected and operating is 2 weeks.

Is there something special I need to know about the BeaconHD specifically or secrets to making meshing in unifi more stable? I’m just sort of at a loss and about to go for powerline adapters just so I wont have to continuously factory reset a Beacon HD every week.

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How weird are these walls? Stone?

Old “town square” type of brick building. From what I understand, a layer of bricks and a smaller layer of concrete separate the 2 floors.

I don’t think the problem is the signal level though because it works totally fine until it just suddenly doesn’t. I feel like I must have something configured incorrectly or a dud of a BeaconHD.

Are you using a specific channel or auto? Maybe it’s migrating to a bad channel? Just guessing.

I have tried both auto and setting a specific channel. Both ways still have the issue. Is there a specific place I need to set for my network connectivity monitor?

I honestly am not familiar with that part of their product line. I think there is an uplink monitor for wireless APs but I don’t know enough and have not used it.
Have you tried resetting it to factory and setting it up again. I have had success with that in the past when things aren’t going smoothly.

Factory resetting does fix the issue for about 1-2 weeks before it roams away again. I was hoping that I was missing the secret sauce that makes everything happy.

You might well be. Hopefully someone who owns one will chime in. Have you tried a different placement in your space?

I ran into the same issues with the BeaconHD, and support couldn’t help to resolve it, so I ended up returning it. Following on the off chance you hear of a solution to this…

I usually try to avoid wireless uplinks (meshing)…but…in a few cases, where the load will be lighter on the perimeter, and if it’s difficult to run wiring there, we’ve used the Beacons. Have an early model (when they were in beta store) down the end of our hall at the office to repeat down to the end offices for an office suite neighbor.

Instead of all the guessing, let’s look at facts and answer those.
*“What is the signal strength of the wireless uplink when connected?”
*“Site survey…what other 5 channels are around where this Beacon is…any overlapping?”
*I see you’re doing the uplink to a newer AP that is 4x4, so that’s good, since the BeaconHD does the uplink ideally using all 4x4. You didn’t lower the channel width from 40 to 20 on the 5 radio did you?

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Did you get it working?

I haven’t been out to that site yet this week but I can’t remember whether or not I had the channel width set to 20 or 40.

I am also thinking about making all the wifi 2.4 ghz only to save the 5fhz antenna just for backhaul.

I will update with what I attempted and the result once I get back to that client.

Revisited the site in question to check and the beacon is happily connected for 13 days. (town had a brief power outage so all devices had the same uptime)

I did check and the dedicated backhaul channel is 40mhz wide.

Maybe it finally decided to behave? I will update this post with anything relevant I come across in the future but I guess all is well at the moment.

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