Has anyone mounted Canopy SMs and/or APs (900MHz) on cell phone towers and not had problems? We are an electric utility using Canopy for SCADA and a phone company wants to install a tower at our substation. We will benefit from a free tower at this site and possibly others. I would think it would cause serious interference but their towers are all over the place.
Thanks in Advance
rconner wrote: Has anyone mounted Canopy SMs and/or APs (900MHz) on cell phone towers and not had problems? We are an electric utility using Canopy for SCADA and a phone company wants to install a tower at our substation. We will benefit from a free tower at this site and possibly others. I would think it would cause serious interference but their towers are all over the place.
Thanks in Advance
It depends on what frequency the provider is using. IN our case, Cingular
installed a cell site right next to our tower in our open-pit mine as part of
an agreement to switch to their service.
We don't have any Canopy in 900MHz but the noise floor was brought
enough that a lot of our 900MHz DataLinc and FreeWave radios will no longer work.
If the cell site is 900MHz, I would be very concerned if any of your links are
marginal.
I have learned that they operate dual frequencies 850 and 1900. We have the Motorola installed band-pass filters on all equipment. What is the reange for the 900’s?
I have several. We own the towers and the cell companys leased space on them. Most of them use 800 and 1900 no real problems yet. where we did see issues though is early on in our 900 deployment when the 900 Canopy first came out you didnt have alot of antenna choices especially horizontal polerized in our testing phase some of these cell carriers like verizon in my case also colocated paging at the sites in 900 mhz. Most paging uses vertical polerization. We tried some of the same antennas and saw alot of rereges. back then it was 6.1 software. When we did finally get in some horizontal antennas and changed them the issue was resolved. You have aboute 30db diffarence between vert and horiz.
FYI 900 will interfear with VHF if your vertical seperation on a tower is less then 10 ft. and AM broadcast antennas will interfear with all canopy or should i say all ethernet so if you are close use good install procedures. Shielded cable and shielded connectors. that seams to be where it gets in the most is around the connector. I have even had to run EMT conduit up the tower and run shielded cable inside the EMT before.
Another big problem with AM is the Canopy surge supressor. I have had customers within a mile or two of a AM station lose connection because when you ground the supressor the am would trip if like a surge but if you take the ground off they work fine.
n7slc nothing against datalinc and FreeWave but i think everything pretty mutch screws with them. I think if you needed to use some 900 canopy you will probably be ok. That does depend on how mutch that noise floor came up though and that could just about affect any band. How mutch did it come up?
attitude0330 wrote: n7slc nothing against datalinc and FreeWave but i think everything pretty mutch screws with them. I think if you needed to use some 900 canopy you will probably be ok. That does depend on how mutch that noise floor came up though and that could just about affect any band. How mutch did it come up?
I haven't had a chance to look at it with the Anritsu, but if I power down
the cell site, everything comes back.
cells towers can definately cause problems. If they are operating inthe 850 band then there is a good chance they will interfere with the 900 stuff.
We have 5.7 co-located with 850 and 1900 GSM without any issues so far.
We had problems with a cell tower when we were using an omni. We sectorized and side-lobed the cell tower and have had no problems since. It seemed that when they uploaded massive amounts of information, it would knock off about 20 subscribers for about an hour.
I have only ptp on towers running 2.4 and 5.7. I have never had a problem. My biggest problem is locating a certified climber if I ever need to change out anything.