Cisco Aironet Access Point Deployment Guide
External Antenna Deployments
All Cisco antenna connectors are labeled A, B, C, and so on. A has a higher priority than B, C, or D; therefore, if the access point supports say three or four antennas and you only have two antennas, use ports A and B until you could install the additional antennas.
It is possible to support 802.11a/b/g clients or single spatial stream N clients with only one or two antennas. Cisco does not recommend this because there is a significant degradation of performance, and ClientLink functionality is lost. If you choose to use fewer antennas, configure the access point in software to not use the other antennas.
Note: The entry‐level AP 1600 has three antenna ports that are not configurable. The AP 2600/3600 has four configurable antenna ports, with one extra transceiver (receiver/transmitter) per band.
MIMOs (dual‐radiating element antennas) include:
AIR‐ANT2524V4C‐R – AIR‐ANT2544V4M‐R – AIR‐ANT2566P4W‐R –
Dual‐band omnidirectional | – 2/4 dBi ceiling mount omni use | |
Dual‐band omnidirectional | – | 4/4 dBi wall mount omni use |
Dual band directional | – | 6 dBi patch wall mount use |
For MIMOs, it is not critical which antenna lead goes into which antenna port on the access point, as long as all the antenna ports on the AP are connected to the antennas. The patch antenna AIR‐ ANT2566P4W‐R has the elements spaced side by side in the plastic housing, so there is a slight improvement if you use the outer two elements on the patch on ports A and B (see Figure 46), but this is not critical. On the AP 1600, port A is spaced furthest from B and C for best diversity, as shown in Figure 47.
Figure 46: 6 dBi Patch Antenna
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