1st live network elevate, success!

After testing the methodology in the workshop, I finally bit the bullet today and replaced a UBNT sector with an ePmP2000 and elevated 17 clients. I had previously moved a couple of XM devices to other sectors, to try to mitigate against possible problems with them.

The process was reasonably straightforward, witha  couple of banana skins almost tripping me up!.

I did it at tower site rather than from office (in case a truck roll was needed).

Rather than load the firmware via Aircontrol I did each SM one at a time (or should that be CPE at that point.!), streamlining the process slightly by putting the file on my Macbook desktop, as each time I browsed for the elevate F/W, as each time it is a new connection, it started me at the desktop rather than the nested folder where I normally store such files.

Then the rigger quickly swapped the sector over on the tower - unfortunately there was no room to have both UBNT and ePmP2000 on the tower at the same time.

Held breath and waited for the SM's to associate, 1....2,,3,,4....pause, 5...pause, 6, ,7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12...11, and then no more.

Waited a few minutes, twaeked the elevation and azimuth, still no more!

Went through the 11 SM's that  were back, and ticked the frequency list boxes, so that they come back more quickly after changing anything, and noticed that although they had figured out that the UBNT CPE's were set up as routers, and had come back as NAT (which is correct) they hadn't 'realised' that DHCP was switched on, and although they had filled in the DHCP start and end ranges and were in the correct subnet, they were not starting and ending from the same address (100 - 120 in our case), so consequently the client wasn't online until I corrected this with each SM.

After this, there was still no sign of the missing 6 SM's, so I was bracing for a 'truck roll'.

Before resigning myself to that, I ldecided to look at the map view of the now offline ex UBNT CPE's to see if there was any common factor btween the missing SM's - and there was!  - They were all four or more miles from the AP, while the connected SM's were less than 3 miles.

Another look at the AP settings, and I spotted the 'Max Range' setting in 'Access Point Configuration' was set to 3 miles!

Changing this to 6 miles and the missing SM's all associated!

So it's a learning curve!

It would be useful if some sort of UBNT to ePmP 'culture difference' guide could be complied to aid the unwary!

Looking at the performance, all looks good, with the AP happlly supporting 60Mb of traffic, a threefold increase over the UBNT sector!

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If you post a photo of your new AP on the tower, I am glad to send you a shirt!

Ray

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thanks - send your shipping address and shirt size to

ray.savich@cambiumnetworks.com

1 Like

I need a shirt too size XL please :slight_smile:

Please send me an email with your shipping address.

Thanks

What is this, free shirts for whoever asks? ;)

Hello  Matthew - even for you if you post a photo of your ePMP Elevate AP.

Ray wonder if  we get a free shirt @ the San Antonio Texas ePMPclass coming up. Because I am going and like to take a picture with that shirt. 

Just send me your shirt size and ship to address at ray.savich@cambiumnetworks.com 

Okay, here it is! took a slight fall (300 ft), but it still works fine and served me well for bench testing ePMP Elevate.

And here is one that's actually being used

And an example of re-using a ubnt antenna

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Hi EI3HG;

Would you mine sharing some of what the items are in the photo?   It looks like the bottom unit is a KP Performance dual-polarized dish.  But I don't see a radio with it.  Is this correct?  Is that a backhaul, what frequency and range are you seeing with this setup?

Is the unit above the dish a licensed parabolic or something?

Also was your Elevate setup for the 5GHz or 2.4Ghz Ubiquiti devices?

Regards.

Hi Matthew;

Great photos.  Is the broken unit an ePMP 2000 AP?    The bottom pictures on the house, trying to figure out the configuration setup.  Is that an ePMP 2000AP attached to the sector antenna?  Is the AP that feeding the omni an ePMP 1000 AP 5GHz or of 2.4GHz model?

Does your ePMP Elevate experience include both the 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz series?   If you are using the ePMP Elevate  2.4GHz series, how is your experience with the CPE/SM devices?  What type of sector antenna are you connecting back to (AP side)?   Does any of your units include the Ubiquiti PowerStation series?  What are your typical distances you are operating the Elevate series with?

Regards.

The bottom dish is a Sky domestic TV satellite dish. Above that is a Jirous 30cm dish for a 17GHz Raycom Ray17 200Mb backhaul radio. Distance is 15km,  Sectors are a Cambium at bottom and a UBNT at top, both 5 GHz.

2 Likes

@Lincs_Chel wrote:

Hi Matthew;

Great photos.  Is the broken unit an ePMP 2000 AP?    The bottom pictures on the house, trying to figure out the configuration setup.  Is that an ePMP 2000AP attached to the sector antenna?  Is the AP that feeding the omni an ePMP 1000 AP 5GHz or of 2.4GHz model?

Does your ePMP Elevate experience include both the 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz series?   If you are using the ePMP Elevate  2.4GHz series, how is your experience with the CPE/SM devices?  What type of sector antenna are you connecting back to (AP side)?   Does any of your units include the Ubiquiti PowerStation series?  What are your typical distances you are operating the Elevate series with?

Regards.


Yes, the broken radio is an ePMP 2000. No, that's not an ePMP 2000 on the house, it a MikroTik PowerBox router (which is powering the three ePMP radios on the site), there is a 2.4ghz ePMP 1000 AP inside that sector antenna. The ePMP1000 AP on the omni is 5ghz.

I have only done some limited testing with Elevate on 2.4ghz, but everything seemed to work as expected. Due to the fact that 2.4ghz noise levels are getting worse all the time in our area, we decided that it made more sense to put resources into switching as much as possible to 5ghz ePMP at this point rather than upgrading all our 2.4ghz APs - but we may revisit that at some point in the future. We're using several different types of sector antennas, but we're primarily using the Cambium ePMP sectors and RF elements carrier class (which are very similar to the old Cambium sectors), we also have quite a few Itelite sectors and we're even using a few old Ubiquiti sectors with ePMP APs (although I wouldn't recommend that, since they have pretty poor F/B ratios, unless they're the newer models or have additional shielding added).

I have no experience with the PowerStation series, but if I remember correctly those are 802.11a/b/g based, which wouldn't be compatible with elevate.

Typical distances are 0-5 miles, but in same cases we go out as far as 10 miles. Overall, there's not much difference between the performance of Elevated SMs and native ePMP SMs.

Matt, 

I've heard not so good things about the ITElites. Specifically the ones with the dual radio support. I've had a few customers try it and after a lot of troubleshooting, swapping them out with the KP dual radio antennae cleared up all the issues. Has your experience been the same?

Thanks,

Sriram