Im thinking of getting 6 epmp 1000 access points with 60 degree antennas but i was wanting 2 of them to be epmp2000 units because 2 of the directions are fairly conjested already. Would there be a problem putting 4 epmp1000 units and 2 epmp2000 units together on a tower? would there be alot of self interferrence due to the antennas being 120/90 degrees? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Our tower is located on top of a hill and if need be, i can put a epmp200 on the roof of the building and still be high above the houses in our most congested area.
The general rule is that sectors that re-use a frequency should be 180* apart in azimuth and share the same general pattern of coverage. That said, depending on vertical and horizontal separatation you might be able to get away with some fudging of that rule.
All of the APs being synchronized will help narrow the needed guard bands between them even if re-use isn't the main goal.
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You can't reuse channel with 120 degree sector but will still have benefit form GPS sync, still no self interferrence between AP but could have interferrence from SM for overlaping sector.
Overlaping sector should have a good chennel separation.
We do this but we don't use the Cambium 120 sector, we use 60 degree horns on the 2000's and 1000 APs. We still see the benefits of the 2000 hardware but also gain the benefit of a smaller antenna pattern.
That sounds like a good idea. Which brand of antennas do you use?
@geraldthunder wrote:That sounds like a good idea. Which brand of antennas do you use?
I'm pretty certain he's using RF Elements horn antennas.
I looked them up, seems too good to be true lol. What kind of performance are you getting out of them? How far out? Im super curious now. The 60 degree antennas that KP performance just released look really good but are 500 a piece. Thats pretty hefty when you ned 6 of them.
yes, Chad is using RF elements horn antennas, I am using those, everyone is using those as they perform better
http://www.auwireless.net/blog/2016/10/25/auwireless-equipment-part-3
My ePMP 1000 GPS APs are using RF Elements TwistPort adapters (get the version 2 adapter) on 60 degree horns. My ePMP 2000 AP is on the Carrier Class horn:
I love these antennas. We are using them mostly on the top of our tower. It is almost 2000' above the town and our subscribers are between 1 mile and 3 miles from the tower. We are having no problems providing 50 Mbps packages to users at 3 miles away on 20 MHz channels (flexible mode) in a fairly dirty RF environment. Closer in town on our mini-pops, we have some 60 degree TwistPort horns with APs using GPS sync (75/25) and provide over 100 Mbps on 40 MHz channels.
When we swapped from a 120 degree sector to a 60 degree horn on the mountain, we saw an immediate improvement in SNR.
The blog post I wrote that is linked above gives some more info.
Cambium makes great antennas, don't get me wrong, but we needed massive vertical beam width (due to the 2000' high AP) and these horms have no lobes. Super clean RF.
thats really cool. i read the blog, tons of information. We got a similar layout and micro pop sites. the only difference is our tower is 79 feet high and the hill is maybe 100 feet about the lower hill where the houses are. we are hoping to get rid of our micro pop sites by making all our aps colocate on one tower. our farthest customer is under 6km away. We are installing a 120 foot tower that can handle more aps which is why we are thinking of the 6 cluster of epmp units. Currently theres a cluster of 6 pmp100 and an epmp100 with a kpperformance omni on it. hoping to lose the omni and the pmp100s. we are still migrating over, it takes quite awhile, especially when you want to minimize downtime with customers
We use the RF Elements 50 degree horns on ePMP 1000 AP's. We recently migrated a 300' tower from 4-ePMP AP's w/90 degree sectors to 6-ePMP AP's using 50 degree horns.
Some key notes:
We did see longer distance SM's get a slightly higher rssi BUT we have seen a huge improvment on performance, speeds and latency. (Not something we expected, but gladly accepted)
We did see a customer around 8 miles out get mid -60's. We were highly impressed with that.
This tower we are running GPS sync/Channel Reuse on 20mhz channels - 5AP's
Our 2nd tower we had only epmp 2.4 and recently added 5Ghz. We added 5 - 50 degree horns again. This time we decided to try out 40 mhz channels. WOW. Doing speeds test online we were getting around 90Mbps. One of our new business customers is getting a consistent30x30!!! I've never seen that before, we tend to overload our AP's.
We are getting ready to upgrade a 3rd tower from 6-ePMP AP's to either 8 or 10. We will use a variety of horns ranging from 30 degree to 90 degree.
Overall, the horns have create a more consistentenviroment for our subs. Links seem to be more stable and consistentacross the board.
Here is drone footage on the 1st tower we upgraded.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0niwjGM9G4
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@Curt Cormier wrote:
Here is drone footage on the 1st tower we upgraded.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0niwjGM9G4
I know this is off topic, but what drone are you using? I have a drone which works great, EXCEPT for our tower work, because of the interference. I don't want to hijack this thread, but I would love to know how drones are working out for people around 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz towers.
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It looks like horns are the way to go, and im also interested in the drone, i noticed it went slightly blurry when you went in front of the microwave but not as bad as one i seen, is that a dji?
Would these help much on smaller towers? Most of our towers are about 100- 200 ft tall.