The sort of out of box experience for this AP is seeing the note on the cardboard to download the controller app from the App Store or Play Store with a pang of, "Oh, no." At least for the experience with Android, attempting to set it up with the app was a no-go. My particular Android device could not manage to connect to the AP for initial setup for the most part and when it did, I didn't manage to complete setup because I appear to have lost the connection halfway through. The good news is I was intending on air gapping the AP until SSID and password is set up and it appears it doesn't start actually broadcasting until after initial configuration, so I connected it to my MikroTik wired router's PoE port and connected to it this way through a Windows 11 computer.
Setup with Windows is easy (though I did shudder by the Java requirement...Java desktop application? What year is this?) and got the AP going in no time after this. Unfortunately, it appears that the AP is super, super lite because you need the controller software running all the time to collect network statistics. I just decided to set it up and forget about the controller aspects. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to need the controller running for the AP to continue to work. But be warned! If your setup is like mine with a standard account for every day use and a separate admin account, the controller software installs itself to the Ubiquiti Unifi folder on the admin account's Users folder. I tried logging in later and couldn't figure out how to get it going again until finally finding it installed itself here. You have to run the start batch file underneath bin to get the controller interface going again.
Outside of software, the AP is a great piece of hardware. I've not run into any significant issues. It's hard for me to comment on the range because I live in an apartment community with a lot of overlap in terms of wireless signals, but it has worked for my purposes.
| Wireless Type | 802.11b |
|---|
