Pulling heat from the back of the board, behind a chip, is fairly common. Since they are made in a flip chip design where the actual logic is closer to the PCB than the top of the casing you can see , where you would normally attach your heatsink. Because of that, pulling heat through the back of the PCB is surprisingly effective and can make a massive difference.

Even without understanding the complexity of the circuitry and RF black magic, it’s still fun to see such a well engineered product.

I'm an IT admin and have used Ubiquity products extensively. An excellent value proposition, but their software always feels... immature. There's always a bit of jank in there. Once you finally get something working, never touch the configuration or it will die in a screaming heap. Quite an odd experience compared to other products. Hardware wise, impeccable.

The grey square is a cermet RF shield. A telematics unit I worked on recently had one bonded to the top of the SoC to cut down on emitted RF. (I had to ask what the heck it was!) As a bonus, they also conduct heat pretty well.

I’m always a huge fan of taking things apart when they are broken. It’s something I’ve done since I was little. It is always fun to try to find the fault.

RF is an unholy blend of plumbing and witchcraft. I never directly worked on them, but I used to get adjacent to some high power RF transmitters in the past, and also did some mechanical maintenance on some microwave stuff, under direction. Huge respect for people that work in that field.

Now that was lovely and complex, it shows just how far we have come from sitting in trees and throwing feces at passer byes. Thank you BC I enjoyed this video.

Ubiquiti produces really nice gear. I am not at all surprised about the complexity of the engineering of their products.

The beam forming multi-phased array antennas on these are especially cool tech.

Microwave antennas are truly some kind of voodoo magic nowadays. I mean the most exotic ones i knew about in the 90s where butterfly antennas, but about a year ago i discovered a channel showing prototypes for 3d printed 3 dimensional mesh antennas with extreme directionality. And i thought i was the smart kid who can build a Yagi or a HB9CV type antenna.

My home and most of my clients use Ubiquiti. Well engineered and last long. Nice apps for mobile too.

I use Ubiquity at home, total overkill but very well engineered and reliable.

Ubiquiti products have always been good value for money. I remember 10 years ago setting up a point to point link between Tenerife and neighbouring island La Gomera using a couple of Ubiquiti dishes (about £70 each) and getting 73Mbps throughput over 34 miles! The same tech is still being used there today to link radio station transmitters on the islands.

It really makes you wonder how much time is used up in engineering to get something like that to fit into such a small space.

Now I feel like I'm getting good value from my home ubuiqui network, including the access point I have in the garden. Slightly sad that that is a £100-£150 AP destroyed through improper usage 😮

Whoa Clive, quite a surprise! Going in the @mikeselectricstuff direction with different kind of products for teardown, different bench as well. Mikrotik and Ubiquiti are some really fine gear, always appreciated here :).

Ubiquiti is nice kit and I've had the pleasure of working with many of their devices. The fixed wireless tower APs and subscriber modules are fun.

I've used solid blocks as heatsinks for chip based amps and find they work well for transient power like audio. Lets the chip run warm which can feel weird to our hand but they test really well at a predictable temp. Sitting at eg 35°C might feel warm but the chips like it more than atmospheric 5 to 25c and hot peaks then cold again. At first having these amps that ran 'hot' but sounded great and were stable as, no drift etc (which would be ideal for RF) seemed odd but having them sit at 35 to 40 was way better than having massive temp swings and the cooldown happening once music has gone from a peak back to very quiet. Also in bi and tri amped setups it let the amp chips run at a more unified temp rather than the tweeter amp never getting into range

Thanks Clive. So this device actually uses heat-SINKs. In recent times the term 'heat-sink' has come to be used for a radiator rather than a heat-sink proper. Cheers.

I got my first ubiquiti router, switch, and APs 2 years ago and love them. They feel powerful for something "consumer grade". It was a bit pricey, but it's been very reliable. Glad to see they are built well.

I fondly forgot all the RF stuff the moment I finished with the exam so many years ago. Great video of a very well engineered device (including the RF bits!)

I do often get impressed by quality of industrial eqipenment some organisation get access to. Its extremely hard for small trader to even hear about good makes, they usualy aren't even available via chains to normal or smaller companies. I have heard about ubiquity in passing, but its nice to see an example and would love to get hands on one seeing how clean power is heat control towards sensitive components etc. SO far only worked with Dreytec and SMC on better grade networking. Thanks for reminding about brand to look into

Lots of heat is produced in voltage control and monitoring circuits so mounting them on opposite side helps with heat. Also it looks like the board is made to create Faraday cages around a number of components so putting certain parts on the other side of the ground plane of the board would help with that

I just had to open one of these today. Same exact issue (the support broke, rain went into it and corroded everything). I recalled watching it here, so I went back and used this video as a reference. I think I can fix it now. Thanks! :)

Puts the home Wi-Fi nodes to shame. You get what you pay for, I suppose. That node does look very well made and quite intricate. Good post, thank you.

they are really good bits of kit. we use them a lot at work both APs and switches and they seem to be really well built. the only let down is there software which can be a bit buggy at times but other than that they are well worth the money. I myself have a Amplifi Alien router and its way over kill for what i need but does the job. Its also actively cooled with the fan turning on when the unit gets to 62'C (even though it spent most its time this summer at 50'C). One thing to note is this. turn the brightness of the LEDs down, it's common for the LEDs to go really dim after about a year of use which can be a real pain if you have them installed outside, my guess is that they are driving the LEDs pretty hard at full brightness so a 50-75% brightness level should extend there life a bit more

Never seen inside one before...very neat!

Wow this was really fascinating. I work as a network engineer and it still blows my mind how all this stuff works. Thanks for the video, I'd love to see some more network device teardowns, maybe one of those wifi smart plugs?

"Not to worry" and "one moment please" are now parts of my vocabulary on a daily basis. Folks look at me funny, but not to worry, it's all for the best.

My home WiFi runs on Ubiquiti hardware. I have an U6 Mesh installed for outdoor duty (Installed upside down - my fault. Fortunately it's in my terrace, under a roof). It works great and has enough range to pretty much cover my entire yard. Ubiquiti APs are essentially setup and forget. You install them and they just work. Unlike most consumer-grade stuff out there.

Wow! What a fascinating and well engineered piece of kit! Thanks so much for sharing your exploration of it with us.

Oh wow, I do this thing for a living and lemme tell you about it The empty pad that you saw is actually directly underneath the CPU with lots of ground vias for heat conductivity from below. The 4 little chip is the FEM (front end module) which combines both TX power amplifier and RX LNA, I haven't read the spec for this one yet but judging by the 2 different color, I'd say it's a 2x2 for 2.4GHz and 2x2 for 5GHz (some vendor will combine it so that there's only 2 antenna instead of 4) The black thingy in the base is just an ethernet transformer for isolating it

Do not let this man near a hospital! "Well this device keeps people alive, lets take it apart!"

Nice ... was looking to buy Ubiquiti for my house ... you helped me decide to go for it :) They're actually quite competitively priced for 'prosumer' units (i.e. aimed at nerds like me).

We've had a lot of problems with ubiquity. Seems to work great for small businesses with one or two APs, but anything bigger just becomes a nightmare

Unifi devices are weird to me. I have a few at home. They're super reliable and easy to set up/configure yet they give off a bit of an Apple vibe? Yet I then go looking at Cisco or Ruckus gear and you seem to need degrees and licences and god knows what to make them work. I do like them though. A solid 9/10 rating.

When I worked at an ISP and we had to provide internet for outdoor events we had great luck with Ubiquiti radios.

I have no clue about RF but it does fascinate me I find it interesting but looks complicated when I have had a look at it on Google etc. It’s always nice to see well built equipment and components but for me it’s the industrial equipment that’s my favourite the chunkier and more robust the better.

Clive, you mentioned copper on the outside of this device. Back in the 20th century, I was on a job that was doing some work for a government agency, but was not the FCC, and, for lack of a better definition, was a shed, made with copper clad panels, and they had copper corner brackets, that had what looked like a copper scouring pad for a restaurant, and this material was placed in the corners behind the corner plates, and the government agency had to have a 100% rf shielded room for sophisticated radio testing. We were not given much information because of the nature of work this agency did, but I'm sure you would have liked to see the actual setup we were dealing with.

These types of items should just be classed as a fisher-price activity centre for engineers ... oooh what does this do?... what's that.. what does this taste like?...... ah good memories 😁

A tecnologia embutida é uma coisa absurda! Obrigado pelo vídeo.

I started to run into more and more stability issues with ubiquiti software and made the switch to tp-link omada, it's the only other viable option that doesn't immediately bankrupt me. I've been pleasantly surprised. TP-link has matured a lot over the recent years. The switch has been quite a positive experience. The software and products are at least as capable as ubiquiti and maybe even better. Also tp-link supported ppsk already for quite a while, ubiquiti only just introduced this feature, too little, too late.

10:06 I opened one of the Nokia PON routers and I found those on top of wifi chips they were just glued with thin double-sided tape They are ceramic heat sinks

You say this was rain damaged? In Scotland! I don't believe you 😂

Way above my paygrade, but fascinating none the less. I'd like to be able to understand the rf antenna stuff but the ol' brain goes nope. Cheers Clive. ✌🇦🇺

That unit REALLY exudes "the essence of unrepairability"! (But luckily most Ubiquity kit is highly reliable). The only way you could design those antennas would be using a dedicated antenna simulator like CENOS or IE3D - and the heat sinking would also need a similar thermal cooling simulation package. I don't think I would have enjoyed being the production manager on that particular product. 😐

These are relatively new products, quite cool to see a (relatively violent) teardown! Purchased a few just last week, funny coincidence!

Please do a teardown/fault analysis of their U6-Enterprise or U6-Pro access points, the ones that arc/spark when grounded. Hunt for "u6-pro sparks" and the forum post (with video) should be the first hit. Yep, top quality hardware design alright! 😂

Those four modules in a row will be the SDR's, one per antenna, or, if SDR functions are done within the Qualcomm main processor, then they could be amplifiers for each of the antennas. Might also explain the heavy metal shrouding around each one... and it would make sense for them to be very close to the qualcomm chip... It's shame the writing was so small on them, since these are arguably part of the secret sauce in Unifi RF kit...

Posting this comment through my U6-LR, ES-8-150W, and ERPoe-5. My entire home network is Ubiquiti (except for the Motorola cable modem) and I am extremely happy with it. 👍🏻

Had a NanoStation which suffered the same fate, completly filled with rain water. I drained it (water was black), rinsed the board in the sink and let it dry. Afterwards i re-soldered the leg of the Buck-Converter which was gone due to corossion and the damn thing worked again!

Awesome bit of kit there BC! That would have been a costly mistake for someone!

Actually corrosion is a lot less of an issue than most ppl think. I repair corroded stuff rather often & although heavy corrosion does usually require specialized chemicals & procedures, sometimes all it takes is a small burnisher, Qtips & brushes. (in this case it looked like 3 or 4 components might need to be replaced near the LAN port, but other than that it looks wholly fixable. The missing ribbon cable connection would be irritating but still replaceable. I think it's still fixible even after your tear down. The pads you were removing come in 5 varieties, Non-reinforced, reinforced, Phase-Change & Solid. Both the non & reinforced are usually a very oily form of silicone with a nano powder that is thermally, but (not electricly) conductive metal inside. The reinforced also has a thin silica or fiberglass gauze inside to give it more rigidity. The solid is usually ceramic like & would usually also have putty on that other end, but to make it removable it looks to sit pretty flush against the heatsink & the heatsink to the case to not be an issue. The other solid varient is a thermal epoxy which is either 2-part, or a solid sheet that you expose to UV that wil melt enough to bond 2 surfaces together (similar to a UV 3D Printer would use) The last, Phase Change Material is like the gallium metal used as thermal paste for the main processor of the Playstation5, in that it is solid at one temp & only liquifies under heat, but unlike most materials the more heat you apply the tighter molecular cohesion htey have with itself. So it holds onto the surface & itself instead of melting everywhere. As for the wireless antennas- the shape, total length, length between turns & the # of turns all matter with regard to the kind of signal you are trying to transmit or receive. The lane tracings are wide becaust it increases the total bandwidth it can transmit at.

I use Ubiquity at home simply because it works. It was amazing how much Wi-Fi jank is out there - I spent hundreds of dollars on top end routers with the latest in Wi-Fi and the majority if doesn't work well - some device will barely work with it without a lot of fussing. Replaced it with a Ubquity and all my Wi-Fi problems went away - everything just magically connects with no issues at all. Not having to deal with Wi-Fi issues at all was something I appreciated - life is too short to deal with jank.

The Qualcomm QCN9024 is the 5GHz Radio PHY chip. The chip under the grey block is the Qualcomm IPQ5018 SoC. It has CPU and a 2.4GHz Radio PHY in it. The 4 little chips next to the antenna connectors are the FEM (Front End Modules) from what I understand. Ethernet is also handled by the IPQ5018. Qualcomm is one of the best manufacturers when it comes to WiFi. That one big chip could either be Flash or RAM. Maybe something different. That's all I know about APs. Sidenote: the U6-Mesh and the U6-PROFESSIONAL share the same hardware. Also counts for the u6-inwall. I have 2 U6-PROFESSIONAL APs at home and 2 are at work. They work great except one of them at work seems to have kicked the bucket (still troubleshooting not sure yet)

Does anyone else find well-built gear kinda sexy. Proper engineering is such a beautiful thing.

Never had a problem with any Ubiquiti installations. Once you get the knack for the quirky installation process it's a cinch. Would be hard for the average user though.

Holy cow Batman, more 6G Death Beams ! Heat sink fins and RF, at this low power, do not play well together. RF 'windows' in the case is clever👍 Thanks Clive, very interesting. , ;)

Nice to know how to open…might try to 3d a new asking to help it cool. Since Inly use indoors. These run hot!

I collect boards like this and pin them to my "technology wall" as engineering works of art. Forget the RF voodoo.There's like the power of 100 IBM PCs on that little board.

Yeah the design complexity doesn't surprise me Ubiquiti has the best designed consumer/office APs, i'm not always happy with their software

Another great video Clive! I thoroughly enjoy your videos and really appreciate the time and effort you put into the channel. I have plenty of other damaged Ubiquiti products that I'd be happy to send your way. Let me know if you're interested.

I read recently that chip numbers are easier to read/photo through a polarised filter. Not been able to try it yet, but thought to mention it here cos it sounds very plausible

I have not had great luck with ubiquiti's outdoor stuff. After having 3 AP's fail I went to the much cheaper TP-Link units and so far they have outlived the ubiquiti devices for my application. Mine failed after they had water ingress through where the antenna connected, the o-rings and everything were in place and they were outdoor rated and they only lasted about 1-2 years at most. The units here look like they are better built than the ones that I was sold, probably a much later design ( and I think they learned something about antennas and exposure to weather ), the TP-Link units are similar in the fact that it's all closed except the end that should be the bottom.

I wonder what happened to Cambium networks? I used to work for them but haven't seen any of their stuff around for years.

Vince the crew chief tried to nibble into the end? He mush have an impressive set of gnashers to chew into that case. 😁

That first ic, next to the rj45 is probably the PoE controller that handles the initial detection and classification with the PSE injector. Everything else comes after that.

I'd be really tempted to clean it up and see if I could get it to power back up.

Even plastic can change the impedance of an antenna... so yes RF is black magic! 😂

The bit that is incredibly interesting about those weird shaped antenna, including the ones that are on/in PCBs made out of trace material, is that those weird folded over F shapes actually form a capacitor/inductor with the trace/antenna material around it which, especially at those higher frequency where the amount and shape of solder on a joint matters, are vital the the proper and efficient operation of the antenna as a radiator/receiver. Though I do agree, RF voodoo is weird. I am of the opinion to become an RF technician one must sacrifice a chicken over ones tool bags as the last step in training......

Cool to see inside one. Im a Ubiquiti Certified Installer and have been deploying their kit for the last 15yrs. All their stuff is really good quality and also pretty cheap compared to competitors in the market.

Although we use Cisco at work for indoor and outdoor wifi, we use Ubiquiti NanoStations for point-to-point links, I've also got a Unifi access point at home (UAP-AC-PRO) which covers the whole house from one unit sitting in the kitchen cabinet. A lot of bang for the buck.

reminds me a lot teardowns of early and pioneering electronic and electric products that are so overbuilt then years or decades later, can be made cheaper doing without the expensive parts.

Damn! Thanks Big Clive for the look inside. That's some complex engineering for sure. Sheesh! This is just for WiFi? The circuit board looks like an aerial view of Hong Kong or something.

there are some old channels devoted to making wifi antennas. some of the shapes and designs are crazy. how they work? nobody knows. they're not as popular anymore because it's very hard to make 5GHz antennas by hand and the cheap 6 antenna routers which get good range out of the box.

I work for an ISP and misconfigured antennas near properties cause so much grief and customer call outs. We even have kit to narrow down rogue access points so those users can configure them correctly to stop interference to others

Thank you. Keep working, good luck.

I have all ubiquity stuff in my house, and while I don't have that exact access point, the ones I do have get very warm. I had to replace one recently because it stopped performing well.

That grey square looks a bit like the ceramic heat spreaders of old CPUs (think 486 era).

I misread, “teardown”, as, “tearoom”…….that’s verrrry different!

You Sir are a master of everything electrical. I love all your content. Cheers from Aussie 🦘🦘.

Hey! You For Got The Hand Drawn Schematic!

I work with ubiquity products everyday almost. Works great in our applications. Never used that product though.

I've used Ubiquiti products extensively at customer locations in my IT business. Not just their WiFi items but cameras, networking and proximity control as well. Always well built and reasonably priced (especially since their competitors generally charge ongoing license fees). However it is well known that their support organization sucks. So if you have a problem, you are on your own.

im a big fan of ubiquiti. it has a really detailed dashbord. provides a ton of easy to process information about what's happening on your network.

Aww, I was most curious about the individual transmit/receive chips. I figure half of them are running at 5.8ghz and the other half at 2.4ghz, that's why you're seeing pairs of matching antenna shapes between each side. I

I had something similar happened with the Wi-Fi access point one of many I had installed at a condo facility. A painter had removed an access point from the mounting arm and then re installed it upside down of course this allowed rain to enter and completely destroy it. destroyed it

Case as heat sink is clever. Designing case as heat sink and antenna combined, now that would be pure genius. 😀

FREE WI-FI: Which sitcom was it, where a character was choosing from a fast food restaurant menu, and they chose the "Free Wi-Fi" ....... "I'll have the free whiffy!" 🤣

A while ago I designed a small radio telescope that uses old sky dishes. I tried designing a helical antenna to increase sensitivity and reduce noise, All I ended up with was a 120dB headache. In the end I found a double helix antenna off the shelf that was suitable and off the shelf LNA and down converter. Unfortunately I do not own the IP for that otherwise I would share it here.

The round base with the round circuit board and the ethernet connector contains what looks like buck regulator circuitry to drop the 48v to 52v POE voltages to something more suitable like 5v or 3.3v.

What a great find, you deserve a special thanks for bringing it to your channel, you could have just let it lay in the garbage. With all that heat dispersal apparatus, I wonder how much power one of those use, of course they are restricted by regulations on the power they emit.

That is nuts dood!

Neat. I work with these all the time and have never seen what's inside.

One of those is the antenna, the other is actually a bottle opener. They had some space left.

The Holtek chip is a M0+ ARM microcontroller.

it would be interesting to hear how a series of nodes can connect to devices randomly as things move around and reconnect sort of like cell phone towers. I usually think of a wifi signal as coming from a single point and you are connected and logged into the one device. I've never understood how this works. All of them must have the same name and password, right?

Ceramic packaging used to be pretty standard on high-end industrial and military specification chips.

that ceramic thing on top of the chip I've seen in a few routers and other network equipment...... I assume it's some kind of carbon?? alternative to a copper block or similar as they seem to be for thermal; they're usually held on with double stick thermal tape or similar

That first side around what I guess is the back of the main processor looks like a little city, very cool. I'm thinking the weight of the heatsink is twofold, one to disipate heat but I think also to add weight as with many products people think something expensive should feel weighty, just my opinion on that last bit though.