Cambium Dual Horn with ePMP 3000

[Craig_Shone]

Hi everyone

We have a small village with three ePMP 3000 units on our tower, running the Cambium 4x4 90 sectors, approximately 60 SM’s per radio, selling 25mbit and 50mbit plans, airtime on the radios around 65%.

Distance between furthest SM and radio is 500 meters, am wanting to add another ePMP 3000 radio or two to spread the load a bit (for us, the 4500 series still needs time to mature).

Have been looking at 60 degree horns & asking around for feedback on the RF Elements 4x4 asymmetrical unit. Can anyone comment on the Cambium dual horn C050900D025A at all for super short range with a lot of noise (600 units in the village, lots of customers of the incumbent with their routers all at 80MHz wide)? I see it’s symmetrical, this post was most insightful:

Moving from ePMP 90° sectors to 60° Dual Horn antennas

In my experience: 1 mile will work really well 2 miles will probably work OK if you have higher gain client antennas. 3-6 miles will not work very well at all with these low gain horns in my experience. As well, you’ll want to check the antenna beamwidth… I think Cambium is doing a UBNT thing with the “60 degrees” on the horns… that’s -6 db loss at 30 degree off-center I think, which means you’re down to less 5ish dBi gain near the edges of these horns. To be fair, these Cambium DualHorns …

Many thanks
Craig

[Craig_Shone]

What I’m hoping to accomplish, just uncertain at this point if I should purchase the RFE 4x4 or the Cambium Dual Horn?

[Eric_Ozrelic]

What’s the AP’s MU-MIMO utilization levels during peak hours? If MU-MIMO utilization is low/none, then you’d be better off splitting the sector up into multiple 30deg asymmetrical horns.

[Craig_Shone]

Radio doesn’t really kick in MU-MIMO much, groupings are there but it seems the radio manages to accomplish what it needs with SU-MIMO. Is there any reason not to try the RFE 60 degree asymmetrical 4x4 unit?

We have little to zero elevation with our villages.

[Eric_Ozrelic]

Yeah, because of two reasons… 1. MU-MIMO isn’t being tapped, so no reason to use a MU-MIMO capable radio… and 2. you mentioned you’re dealing with a lot of noise, so using a 30deg asymmetrical horn is going to help you much more then what you’re currently using, or even a 60deg horn. Another nice thing you can do with 30deg horns is the horns on the outside edges you can probably use frequency reuse if they’re far enough apart.

So I’d convert to 3x 30deg 2x2 asymmetrical horns… and on the two outside horns you might be able to use frequency reuse.

OR, if you wanted to upgrade to something that would give you even more potential bandwidth/headroom, just swap out for a single 4500 8x8 AP and start gradually swapping out to e4k SM’s.

[Craig_Shone]

So it’s now 10PM and I managed to grab captures from two of the ePMP 3k units. Interesting to see one with MU-MIMO in play and one without. I understand your recommendation based on if MU-MIMO was not present, makes sense, thanks!