Does anyone use this audio tuning headset and if so, do you like it or dislike it? How well does it work for you? We currently do a site survey, put the 900 mhz antenna and radio on a pole and extend it up in the area we wish to install. Then plug in the laptop and go from there. Seems more often then not, we are not getting good signals and we end of spending way, way too much time fooling around with where we might install the antenna. We are all new to the canopy and me completely new to this. Just trying desperately to learn all I can, anyway I can to try to move forward. Just seems like we are missing something simple with these installations. When I installed at my house, we were operational in less the ten min. When I go to other sites that should be simple, it takes forever and we seem to have one thing after another go wrong. This has to be simpler. Granted this is a learning curve for all of us. We are using 900 mhz for the most part. Flat land with some trees. Ap’s are at 370 feet about 7 miles from the office. My house is about five miles from the tower. Elevation of my antenna is about 12 feet from ground. My neighbor about 4 houses over has his antenna on his chimmey on a two story house. He shoots through some high tension power lines. His link is up, then down, then up, with a 1300 rssi and 3/4 jitter range. My rssi is about around 1450 and a jitter of 2 with 100% up and down links. But we have tried other neighborhoods and we finally get it set up with good rssi/jitter, install, and then bam, the jitter starts spiking.
In my opinion the headset is not that useful. I prefer using my laptop and testing from the point we install the surge suppresor.
Try to imagine putting up a 30ft pole with canopy on it with the headset connected to it. Then imagine putting down the pole just to disconnect the headset? I find it to be a bad design. Ideally the headset should be able to be connected down there on the ethernet and easily removed once the link is established.
Just my 2 cents.
Bandit wrote: Does anyone use this audio tuning headset and if so, do you like it or dislike it? How well does it work for you? We currently do a site survey, put the 900 mhz antenna and radio on a pole and extend it up in the area we wish to install. Then plug in the laptop and go from there. Seems more often then not, we are not getting good signals and we end of spending way, way too much time fooling around with where we might install the antenna. We are all new to the canopy and me completely new to this. Just trying desperately to learn all I can, anyway I can to try to move forward. Just seems like we are missing something simple with these installations. When I installed at my house, we were operational in less the ten min. When I go to other sites that should be simple, it takes forever and we seem to have one thing after another go wrong. This has to be simpler. Granted this is a learning curve for all of us. We are using 900 mhz for the most part. Flat land with some trees. Ap’s are at 370 feet about 7 miles from the office. My house is about five miles from the tower. Elevation of my antenna is about 12 feet from ground. My neighbor about 4 houses over has his antenna on his chimmey on a two story house. He shoots through some high tension power lines. His link is up, then down, then up, with a 1300 rssi and 3/4 jitter range. My rssi is about around 1450 and a jitter of 2 with 100% up and down links. But we have tried other neighborhoods and we finally get it set up with good rssi/jitter, install, and then bam, the jitter starts spiking.
Bandit wrote: Does anyone use this audio tuning headset and if so, do you like it or dislike it?
We do. We like it. We also check it with a laptop.
Bandit wrote:
How well does it work for you? We currently do a site survey, put the 900 mhz antenna and radio on a pole and extend it up in the area we wish to install. Then plug in the laptop and go from there. Seems more often then not, we are not getting good signals and we end of spending way, way too much time fooling around with where we might install the antenna.
Everyone has this problem. The physical location of the install usually makes a pretty big difference with respect to signal strength and sometimes with respect to jitter as well. Spend the time finding the "sweet spot". Remember:
* Higher is usually better but not always.
* The direction to the tower that the GPS gives you does not take into consideration reflections and other things which can influence the best antenna direction.
* Jitter can be caused by many things.
* SMs which are not running the same version of the firmware will report different signal strengths. This can be confusing.
* Don't install unless you have a received signal of -77 dBi with an average jitter less than four. Later when you have more experience trouble shooting interference you can push the envelope.
* power lines
* cable tv amplifiers
* cordless telephones
* baby monitors
* electric fences
* battery chargers
* radio controlled toys
* Sometimes you point the antenna to get signal strength.
* Sometimes you point the antenna to minimize jitter.
Bandit wrote:
We are all new to the canopy and me completely new to this. Just trying desperately to learn all I can, anyway I can to try to move forward. Just seems like we are missing something simple with these installations.
There are lots and lots of little things which you will learn with more installs. Concentrate in the beginning on building every link the very best you can.
Bandit wrote:
When I installed at my house, we were operational in less the ten min. When I go to other sites that should be simple, it takes forever and we seem to have one thing after another go wrong. This has to be simpler. Granted this is a learning curve for all of us. We are using 900 mhz for the most part. Flat land with some trees. Ap's are at 370 feet about 7 miles from the office. My house is about five miles from the tower. Elevation of my antenna is about 12 feet from ground. My neighbor about 4 houses over has his antenna on his chimmey on a two story house. He shoots through some high tension power lines. His link is up, then down, then up, with a 1300 rssi and 3/4 jitter range. My rssi is about around 1450 and a jitter of 2 with 100% up and down links. But we have tried other neighborhoods and we finally get it set up with good rssi/jitter, install, and then bam, the jitter starts spiking.
Interference is the real problem at 900 MHz. Schedule an outage on your AP(s) and do a site survery by switching the AP to an SM and using the spectrum analyzer to check the spectrum on each of your access points. This can tell you a lot about what interference exists in the area that each AP is servicing. We use omni antennas because we are rural and forrested so our deployment model requires many small pops. Because of the omni antennas we see a lot of interference.
We have learned:
* Interference is usually a problem at the subscriber end more than at the AP end because the SM is on the ground with the noise.
* Interference is usually a very localized problem. Two subscribers two hundred meters apart rarely have the same sources of interference. This distance would increase in prarie country or in the absence of forest cover.
* Interference is very hard to identify with the tools provided on the Canopy system. Easy to diagnose, hard to identify.
* Powerlines *are* a frequent offender.
We use omni antennas because we are rural and forrested so our deployment model requires many small pops. Because of the omni antennas we see a lot of interference.
Could you go in to more detail of using 900Mhz and Omnis for micro pops?
I have the same situation and have been considering 900 MHz micro pops, however I have been concerned with interference issues.
What distance are your micro pops from each other? How do you handle only 3 channels? Do you backhaul with a different frequency? or do you use 900 MHz?
Any info on what you are doing would be very useful
BTW where are you located?
Thanks
Adam
adamb wrote:
We use omni antennas because we are rural and forrested so our deployment model requires many small pops. Because of the omni antennas we see a lot of interference.
Could you go in to more detail of using 900Mhz and Omnis for micro pops?
I have the same situation and have been considering 900 MHz micro pops, however I have been concerned with interference issues.
Interfernece is a definate problem because 900 MHz is very cluttered. Here in eastern Virginia even Verizon is a problem. They have a UHF trunking system which operates between 909 MHz and 919 MHz and seems to have 50 KHz channels. That is 200 voice grade channels! At ten AM and two PM they show about a forty or fifty percent channel utilization across that spectrum. Since they are *WAY* over power (24 dB parabolics on the towers), and since they are *ALL OVER* this end of the state, they look like a broadband jammer operating dead center of 900 MHz ISM. Is it legal? I don't know, but it sure is there and it sure is Verizon, and it sure is connected to the POTS system at both ends. Aw, well. That wasn't the question was it? :)
Interference is so bad in the 900 MHz spectrum around here that I recommend a careful reading to rhe ARRL's RFI handbook. The average noise floor for this area is around -84 dBm. I have cable TV interference from cable amplifiers that are so old they have vacuume tubes in them and AC power running to them. They are just hung on the power poles, rusty, and in serious need of repair. Baby monitoring systems are problematic in towns and built up areas, especially the ones which have video. Ditto some wireless security systems, some cordless telephones, and some electric fenses. An AP will not have as much trouble with these systems which serve people as will the SMs because these low power systems are close to the subscriber, not the AP. The AP will have problems with systems like the Verizon one mentioned above because it is operating in band, and is deployed above average tree height.
adamb wrote:
What distance are your micro pops from each other? How do you handle only 3 channels?
At this time we only have two pops but we are deploying three more in the next month or so. The closest two will be about two miles apart. We are in a heavily forested area and two miles here is like ten miles if the APs are kept below average tree height. We have not gone thru our first winter yet and I expect some problems with self interference unless I get our synchronization setup correctly. We backhaul on 5.8 and 2.4 APs running sectors or omni's as well. This is a temporary solution which we don't expect to scale beyond more than five or six pops per AP and perhaps two dozen subs per pop.
Noise is so bad here that we just find the cleanest part of the local spectrum with the SA tool and center the unit on that notch.
adamb wrote:
Do you backhaul with a different frequency? or do you use 900 MHz?
Canopy is not designe to do backhauls on the same frequency band as the access point delivers service. We had a great long discussion of this in another thread and Canopy_Support *finally* jogged my brain enough to get me to understand what is going on with synchronization:
* All canopy units operating co-located in the same band *MUST* be synchronized.
* All AP's *WILL* transmit at the same time when synchronized.
* All SM's *WILL* listen at the same time when synchronized.
* All hardware is sensitive to any transmission in the band it is designed to use and will be sensitive to interference which is "in band" but "off frequency".
Therefore since a subscriber module used as a backhaul will be listening for it's controlling AP *AT THE SAME TIME* that it *COLOCATED* AP is trying to talk to it's clients, if they are on the same band, the SM backhaul will not be able to hear it's controlling AP.
Always backhaul on a different band, unless you really understand RF, antennas, and sheilding.
adamb wrote:
Any info on what you are doing would be very useful
BTW where are you located?
Thanks
Adam
Eastern Virginia -- The Northern Neck to be specific.
Micers,
Are you guys using vertically polizarized onmis or did you spring for the huge and expensive horizontal pol antennas?
Thanks,
ahull wrote: Micers,
Are you guys using vertically polizarized onmis or did you spring for the huge and expensive horizontal pol antennas?
Thanks,
Huge and expensive. :)