Cisco Aironet 1600 Deployment Manual page 35

Understanding External Antenna Deployments
While it is not recommended that you use less antennas – the product (in a pinch) would support
802.11a/b/g clients or single spatial stream N clients using only one or two antennas however there is a
significant performance hit and you would lose Client Link functionality – Should you do this, you
would also want to configure the Access Point in software to not use the other antennas.
The AP 1600 has three antenna ports (not configurable as it is an entry level AP). The AP 2600/3600
Note
has four configurable antenna ports - one extra transceiver (receiver/transmitter per band).
When using a MIMO (dual-radiating element antennas) such as:
AIR-ANT2524V4C-R – Dual-band Omni-directional – 2/4 dBi Ceiling mount Omni use
AIR-ANT2544V4M-R– Dual-band Omni-directional – 4/4 dBi Wall mount Omni use
AIR-ANT2566P4W-R– Dual band directional – 6 dBi Patch wall mount use
It is not critical which antenna lead goes onto which antenna port on the Access Point so long as all the
antenna ports on the AP are connected to the antennas. In the case of the Patch antenna
AIR-ANT2566P4W-R, since the elements are spaced physically apart (side by side) in the plastic
housing, there is a slight improvement if you use the outer two elements on the Patch on ports "A" and
"B" but again it is only a small improvement and not critical and that is why we do not label them.
Cisco Aironet Series 1600/2600/3600 Access Point Deployment Guide, Release 7.5
35