I know I have been posting alot, thanks for all your help so far…
My question to you is: Do you have problems when it rains? Do you see a few subscribers drop off temporarily? Have you done anything to help this and what?
Thanks for all and any reply
Zach
I think it can be caused by trees. I mean, if it rains, the trees get more wet, and causing reflection or extra attenation. Do you have a clear LOS?
Using 5.2 and 5.7 gear with clear LOS I have never had an issue with any type of precipitation.
If I remember right it was mainly the 2.4 people that were having some problems. Some have LOS and some don’t. We usually have a reflector installed on most subscribers.
wirelessSolutions wrote: I know I have been posting alot, thanks for all your help so far...
My question to you is: Do you have problems when it rains? Do you see a few subscribers drop off temporarily? Have you done anything to help this and what?
Thanks for all and any reply
Zach
Rain ...
If you have links with LOS obscured by trees or for that matter with fresnel encroached by trees you can and will see losses due to rain but they are not what you would think at first.
Losses due to rain at these freqs are practically nil, so why do we see losses and link problems during and after rains. Imagine every little leaf that hangs in the fresnel zone on a link. Imagine it has been dry for a week or two and those little leaves are all closed up tight as little drums trying to conserve water. They are lean, mean, evaporation machines and they are only letting out the minimum water necessary to feed the rest of the tree by capillary action. Now along comes a nice downpour, it rains all night and in the morning all your links that are not clean LOS are showing 2 or 3 dB less link budget than yesterday. Imagine all those little leaves, everyone of them is swolen to twice it's normal thickness with water. Every one of them absorbs twice as much as it did yesterday.
The moral of this story? Build more solid links. Don't accept a marginal site survey, unless you have the time to work a day or two on that specific link to get it working properly because if it is marginal in dry weather it is going to go down in wet weather.
I have one 5.2GHz SM that gets marginal signal when it rains. The result: multiple re-registers. The problem was much worse during and after a late-winter storm of wet snow.
The link, I believe, barely has visual LOS; lack of RF LOS is of course the problem. The SM is on a 30’ mast on top of the 20’ peak of a house, but it’s trying to clear 60-80’ trees about a block away. The AP is at 130’ and 1.2 miles away.
I live with the problem because the SM is on my own house. I rationalize not improving the link by considering it a test environment. More likely it’s a case similar to the cobbler’s kids not having shoes.
I live with the problem because the SM is on my own house. I rationalize not improving the link by considering it a test environment. More likely it's a case similar to the cobbler's kids not having shoes.
I couldn't have said it better myself. We too have a situation like this. Very tall trees are present directly behind our house. The link is only acceptable and able to pass data during the fall/winter months when there is no foliage. We use 5.7.
A month or so ago when the foliage was just starting to come up, I ventured up to the roof to see if there may be a better location to move or place a SM to get us through this summer without having to resort to dial-up again. At that point, I found a nice hole in the trees such that I could physically "see" our tower. The previous location of the dish was going through (2) sets of trees. The ones in back of our house, and ones behind the neighbor's house across the street, with no visual LOS. We kept the original in place, and put a new one in the new location. It worked well, til one morning the link was just gone. Funny, the night before it was perfectly fine.
It's frustrating to work with this equipment all the time only to not have a solid connection from home, isn't it?
We just cut down the trees or cut bigger holes in the trees. Its amazing also how many neighbors don’t care if you prune one or two of their trees so long as they dont actually have to do the work. Many of our customers have to trim their trees every summer to keep the links working on 5.7 and 5.2.
on my case, rain do not affect the performance of my network. i have deployed around 8 5700SMs passing thru trees and the other 5700SMs do not have a clear LOS due to leaves covering but still, it has a good signal.
=)