mANTBox 2 12s (RB911G-2HPnD-12S)

The mANTBox 2 12s (product code RB911G-2HPnD-12S) is a sector antenna with the radio built into it. One radio on 2.4 GHz, one gigabit port, and antenna for the rest. It hangs on a mast or a wall and serves a sector: a campsite, an industrial estate, a row of barns, a few buildings looking back at it with CPEs.

The catalogue records the default configuration ap-sector. That says exactly what it is: the end that broadcasts, not the end that connects. The stations on the far side are separate devices, a BaseBox or another CPE for example.

The port

• ether1: one gigabit port, with PoE-in. Power and data over the same cable, which is the point on a mast.

There is no PoE-out: the catalogue records no feeding port, so the PoE-out per port field never appears. See PoE-out per port.

The catalogue records no WAN port for this model. If you do pick a role with an internet side, the tool falls back to the first wired port, ether1. In the link roles that never happens: everything goes into the bridge and the device only gets a management address.

One port means Office router with VLANs, Router + CAPsMAN and Hotspot are greyed out with "Needs at least 3 wired ports (WAN + LAN + trunk)".

The radio

One radio, wlan1, on 2.4 GHz. For this job that is a deliberate choice: 2.4 GHz reaches further and through more than 5 GHz, at the cost of speed and with more neighbours on the band. Pick a narrow channel and look at what is already in the air before you choose one; see Channels, width and power and Doing a Wi-Fi survey.

The Wi-Fi package is wireless, the older of the two in RouterOS v7. The script therefore writes /interface wireless: no WPA3, no 802.11r, no configurable management frame protection. The catalogue records no Wi-Fi generation for this model. One point matters for a sector: station-bridge on the client side only works towards another MikroTik that also runs wireless. See Setting up Wi-Fi.

What is inside

From the catalogue: MIPSBE, 64 MB of memory and licence level 4. A switch chip is not recorded for this model, so we do not name one. At 64 MB the small-board warning appears: keep the configuration small, do not install extra packages, and check what is free with /system resource print.

hw_vlan is empty, so the warning about bridge VLAN filtering and hardware offload does not appear here. With one port a VLAN setup is unusual on this device anyway; if you need to separate customers, that happens on the router at the other end of the cable.

What it is good at, and where it runs out

Good at: serving one sector with a predictable radiation pattern, in an enclosure that may live outside. Point-to-multipoint over a few hundred metres is what this device was designed for.

Where it runs out:

• 2.4 GHz is crowded. In a town the band is full. You gain range, not capacity.
• One port. Nothing hangs behind it but the cable going down.
• 64 MB. No hotspot, no containers, no heavy firewall.
• No throughput figures. Our catalogue does not record them. What a sector achieves depends on the number of clients, the distance and the noise, and the tool says nothing about that.

Which roles fit

• Wireless CPE / point-to-point: the role that belongs here. On this device choose the Access point side, and Station on the CPEs. Both ends get the same SSID and passphrase, and everything is bridged.
• Access point and CAP (managed by CAPsMAN): available, because there is a radio. CAPsMAN lets you give several sectors the same settings; see CAPsMAN.
• Wi-Fi repeater: available. With one radio it rebroadcasts on that same radio and you keep at most half the throughput.
• Home router and VPN gateway: offered, because this is not a switch. Rarely what you want in practice.
• Harden only (baseline): for a sector that is already mounted.
• LTE / 5G router is greyed out with "No LTE modem".

The quickest route to a working configuration

1. Pick One device and search for mANTBox or RB911G.
2. Pick Wireless CPE / point-to-point and set the mode to Access point.
3. Set the country, choose a channel, and fill in the SSID and passphrase. Those same two go on every CPE.
4. Give the device a static management address; on a mast you want to know where it is.
5. Set an admin password, reset and paste the script. See Using the script.

If you are building the sector and the CPEs, use Multiple devices: SSID, passphrase and management addresses then stay together in one set of scripts.

What trips people up

• Setting the sector to station. This is the broadcasting end. Two stations never find each other.
• Picking a channel without looking. On 2.4 GHz your neighbour decides your result.
• Expecting WPA3. The wireless package does not know it.
• Station-bridge towards something other than MikroTik. That does not work; pick a different station mode.
• The power. The port takes PoE-in; the injector at the bottom has to supply it. See PoE does not power the device.