Has Cambium considered making a larger dish e.g. 75cm for an extra 3dbi gain, for the 3Ghz PMP line?
They may have considered it, but I highly doubt that they’ll make something like this.
I know that they were toying with the idea of releasing a low cost 3’ dish for PMP450b 5GHz awhile ago (we actually performed the beta testing), but we found that the installers didn’t like the dish, customers didn’t like the dish, it required a much beefier mount (like a big satellite dish tri-mast), and it only resulted in a few extra dB gain. There were way too many tradeoffs and so I believe that product was cancelled. Although I’m sure @CambiumMatt will chime in immediately if I’m off base.
For 3GHz, there’s the PMP450i 3GHz connectorized radio which has a maximum TX power of 25dBm plus you can use a 3’ dish with this for 26dBi gain… which grants you a maximum EIRP of 51dBm. This is what we’ve used in the past… but it’s an expensive solution with only 2dB extra gain compared to the 450b 3GHz and its 29dBm max TX + 20dBi dish (49dBm EIRP).
As Eric mentioned, it is an expensive “upgrade” but we have used both the Rocketdish 3g26 and the KP Performance 25.5 dBi Dual Pol Feed Horn Antenna with the connectorized 450i CBRS radio. It does make a difference, but whether it is worth the added cost and hassle isn’t always clear.
At ~$US650 for just the connectorised radio, there is no way any customer would pay for the upgrade?
I figured slotting the existing 450B radio into a 75cm dish would be more cost effective.