Interesting day with 900MHz
I have had a customer installed for several weeks and the performance has never been stellar. During this time, the RSSI has ALWAYS been better than 1400 and the Jitter has ALWAYS been better than 4.
He had a couple of worms including WinMX so his machine was spewing packets, and as such I told him he had to get that fixed before I could troubleshoot any further. He finally got the machine cleaned up so I went out today to work on the system.
I thought the router may have been hosed so I replaced that first. After replacing the LinkSys router, there was no improvement in performance so I put the old one back in. This eliminated the PC and the router leaving only the radio.
“But the RSSI and Jitter are so good” I cried! “It just CAN’T be the radio…can it?”
Well even though the RSSI and Jitter were excellent, I decided to move the radio from it’s position 30’ away from two Eucalyptuses firing through a 10’ gap in the trees to the other side of the trees for a completely clear look at the mountain.
The RSSI went up to 1600+ and the Jitter went up to 5, but damn if he isn’t seeing the full 600 x 600 he is allocated. Previously he was lucky to see 120 x 120.
So, the moral of the story is that Jitter and RSSI are good indicators, but they don’t tell the whole story. If in doubt, get a clear LOS.
Jerry Richardson
airCloud Communications
rssi’s in the 1300-1400 range are barely useable on 900 in my experience
very unlike the other ranges
Interesting. I currently have a customer who has never had more than 1000 RSSI through 2.5 miles of scattered trees, and she consistently has 97-98% efficiency. Weird.