sdk 2.6.6. We have our hilink 7688a boards connected halow, one is a station setup as bridge, the other is the ap setup as ethernet/router in this test case, both have their wifi ap enabled, both have blue leds indicating halow is connected (red led means halow not connected). The station and ap in this test environment are only about 20’ apart, one inside the building, the other outside, line of sight is some windows and some concrete walls. We’re having an issue with halow dropping out at times and wanted to see what y’all might have for ideas to diagnose for the cause. Halow can be connected with no problem (say, you power cycle the boxes, within about 90secs the blue leds come on), it could be a matter of hours or maybe shorter before it drops then reconnects. It’ll do this multiple times over a period of time. When that happens, the led turns red (we’ve been there at that moment and observed). I have debug to know that an ifdown even happened on ahwlan on the station, being logged to a file so we can recover it. This would be a typical message:
[Fri Nov 7 17:06:40 UTC 2025] user.notice HOTPLUG: 05-getapipaddr ****** ‘ifdown’ - device:‘’ interface:‘ahwlan’ ******
This is important to resolve because we have devices using the halow connection with socat and comms are stopped when this halow ifdown happens on its interface.
I ran this test on a table with different boards only 2’ apart, but I only had a halow antenna on the station, not the ap. Halow connects ok, socat runs ok but a short time later I observed the halow i/f do ifdown and ifup. I thought that was due to not having the antenna on the ap, which was part of my test to see if that has anything to do with it. But since it’s happening in a more production format with antennas and short distance as I first mentioned, that’s very concerning to have this issue.
Thus, it’s mandatory we understand why halow i/f doing whatever it’s doing to cause the hotplug to do ifdown and ifup and not have a consistent, stable connection without any blips.
This may take a couple of back and forths of comms with you as you may ask other questions to also try to understand what we’re seeing with whatever may help, like rf levels, logs, whatever. We are consistently getting halow drops and need to know why.
Maybe this is another data point? I’m connected wifi to the station with the laptop. I’m either using winscp to navigate through directories or the terminal in the device web page, then it loses wifi connection. It comes back a short time later. Could that be related?