Haha! I was about ready to pitch my Bullet M5 in the garbage; it was a royal pain to set up. I eventually had an IT professional friend help me out. He was stumped at first, did a bit of research, and came back with a solution. It involved setting a narrow channel, and limiting available channels, I believe. Since then, it's been rock solid for me at impressive range.
Yeah it's defo possible to get them working well, I had the M2 version for years and it worked great.
But like any professional product, it has lots of options and settings which on the one hand is great but on the other you need a little bit of knowledge to get them to work properly.
First of all yes you defo have to turn AirMax off. Thats a special communication mode that Ubiquiti gear uses when one access point is talking directly to another, for beaming data from one building to another or across a city or something, it's not for normal devices to connect to.
As said above, set it to Access Point Mode. However I did tick to allow WDS bridge. This means that as well as the ipad talking to the desk which assess point mode allows, other devices can talk through the access point. For me that meant that I connected the laptop playing test tunes to the wifi as well and the ipad could control that too, letting me change tracks as I walked about.
In terms of power, when I first started I automatically ramped the power up as high as it could go, thinking this would give me best range. Dont lol. The way it was described to me was its like someone shouting as loud as they can in a room. It's pretty hard for anyone else to talk, and the ipad needs to be able to talk back too. Go for a middle power setting to start with and adjust from there.
Set your SSID and password, and decide if you want the network private.
In terms of channel width. This is one that will take a little adjusting. A wide channel width passes more data, has more bandwidth, but is more susceptible to interference from other wifi devices in the area. A narrower channel width more robust and gives a more reliable connection, even if the bandwidth is a bit smaller.
After that it's down to IP addresses and understanding how that works (I know you may understand this but I'll type some general set up rules for anyone who doesn't and may be reading).
IP addresses can be manually set within the network, or can be dynamic, meaning they change. To use dynamic addresses, something in the network has to be in charge of doing this, and each time a new device comes onto the network this controller, the DHCP server, tells it what address to use.
Thats why you don't have to faff about with network addresses in your home network for example, the DHCP server is built into the router box given to you by your provider and when someone comes over with their phone or laptop and connects it sorts that all out.
However for your gig set up, the Bullet doesn't have a DHCP server built in, and neither does your desk or your iPad. You may have a network switch within your system that does, but assuming not and assuming you're just plugging the Bullet straight into your desk, you're gonna need to set all the IP addresses manually.
There are two main things to set, the address and subnet.
Subnet is the easy part, set it to 255.255.255.0 on everything.
For the address, home networks usually run on 192.168.0.xxx
where the xxx part has to be unique to each device. Now you don't have to use that exactly, you could use 192.168.15.xxx for example if you wanted, but the point is that you need to have the first 3 sets of digits the same for all devices, and they all need a unique last set to replace the xxx
In my set up I follow a system where the
My mixing desks are all in the 10s, so
192.168.0.11
182.168.0.12 etc
access points are all in the 20s, so
192.168.0.21
192.168.0.22 etc (I have a couple for different systems/desks/jobs)
laptops all have 30 something on the end, 31, 32 etc etc,
and so on, so everything has a fixed unique address.
Once all that is all set up and everything is all talking to each other, that's all the hard work done.
Then when you start your stagemix app, you're telling it whatever IP address you've set for the desk, telling it to go look for the desk at xxx address on the network, and it should connect.
Kev
