ePMP GPS rant

I don’t see any posts from you posted earlier than Nov 30, '20.
I don’t see any tickets opened in the Cambium support center that correlates with your e-mail address either.

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It is what it is, ePMP has always had sync issues. Maybe they are due to LTE and maybe they aren’t but it doesn’t matter because the only difference is “Cant’ be fixed” or " Could be but they won’t fix it", either way it’s not getting fixed any time soon. So your choices are fix it yourself with sync over power (pretty inexpensive / reliable / easy to install) or leave it broken and continue to lose money and customers while you come here and rage against a machine that hears you and don’t care.

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Out of curiosity, I set our epmp network to use only the onboard GPS.

We only have the newer square talgos gps pucks with three of them in shrouds to block the LTE towers from desensitizing them. All GPS pucks are mounted to a virticle object behind and either above or below (mounting location specifics make above or below a better option but always behind the antenna ground plane) the antenna with the cable pointed down as per the manufacturers specifications (not horizontal as found in Cambium sector antennas) the AP’s hold off timer is set to 3600 and all are on firmware 4.6.0.1 with the GPS firmware fully up to date.

A week in and so far not one loss of sync event in the logs, I do see some SNR drift on the GPS pages but considering the weather we have had its not unexpected. Sync events are logged even when in holdoff, this was tested.

Our network has a mix of epmp1000’s and 3000’s, some even on the same tower, fully synced network. Most towers can see/hear two LTE sites with a couple having 5 LTE sites.

Our towers use Packetflux Cambium Sync injectors with syncbox jr’s normally.

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That is your prerogative. If you don’t want anyone to remote admin, that’s up to you. I have found it VERY helpful when they do – but that is optional, and it’s your option… totally up to you.

This just ridiculous. It takes moments to send in a tech support file - and it’s needed in order for them to be able to see what’s going on. That’s simply you being childish, selfish, and unhelpful. That’s not doing the community (the rest of us) any help either. That’s just having a temper tantrum.

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Fedor
Three years ago I was part of another company and we approached and opened the floor cards with another email and nickname.
Unnecessary waste of time and nervousness
That’s the least important thing right now!
You managed to squeeze us there, but my voice can be heard here on the forum.
Let me ask you, Fedor, to answer from the point of view of an engineer.
Is it okay to keep GPS sync time when there is no 1pps from the satellite. Leave all this to the internal oscillator for a time of 86400 seconds and with the new firmware 864000 seconds.
And there in the second part of the device settings you can choose a frame size of 2.5 (beta) or 5 mS.
Have you simulated this on several APs that have more than 30 SM and each of them IPTV and other online services.
Followed the performances after an hour, two, a day or two. One was warmer and the other colder.
If you did that to the person who wrote those 864000 seconds you would automatically shoot the same seconds, raise the alarm and say no more sleep or food until that sync is fixed. We can allow the internal oscillator 2 hours at most.
Best regards

Zica - you’re honestly being childish, having a tantrum. Increasing the TimeOut was NOT proposed as a “solution” by Cambium. As far as I know, it was a stop-gap & diagnostic step, and it was in response to user requests. In other words, some users requested it, and Cambium obliged.

Why don’t you PLEASE just send them your ‘Tech Support Files’? Send them publicly, on the forums. If you don’t want to take your conversation to a Support Ticket, and if you don’t want to allow them access to remote login, that’s up to you. But there’s no mature logic to not sending them your Tech Support Files.

Sakid
I will never open any more support tickets because I was just wasting my time, on phone calls and writing emails. The problem is not solved and has existed since the beginning of ePMP.

For the tenth time on the forum I am asking you from Cambium to stop doubting the GPS pack antennas.
The same antennas are used by Ubiguiti, Mimosa and others.
He does it there constantly.
Two GPS antennas next to each other are also pointed. One uses a Cambium that crashes several times a year and drives me crazy. The second is used by Ubiquiti, on which the GPS has been working since the day of installation without incident. Without any movement of the packs, I just replace the places with SMA connectors. Ubiquti continued the following year with steady GPS sync while Cambium crashed as before.
They all use the same ceramic resonator as the antenna, the same radio chip, the same coaxial cable.
It’s just an active GPS antenna for which firmware is written and that’s it.
Sakid you say you never made it to one tower to see how we install it at all.
Luckily for you and unfortunately for us, there are people like me who have to do it even when they shouldn’t, so I invite you to go out to the tower with me.
It is terribly difficult to just approach the tower, let alone climb against the strong wind.

I think that after several such visits to the tower, the development team in Cambium would take them hostage and threaten them that there would be no salary or food until this is resolved.
The accompanying problem on the topics of GPS sync outages was not only the one who did not use it.
I think it’s high time to sort this out. You said you care about big and small customers like you said. It’s a huge investment for me to invest in a few more PacketFlux or similar devices. and I have already given all the money to Cambium for her (in my country it is so). I am on the verge of bankruptcy and that in order to buy more of these accessories I should sell my wife’s gold jewelry which she inherited but she does not accept it.
You have also introduced yourself as a leading company in this field, so it should be but …
GPS sync with a pack antenna should work, ok sometimes it can theoretically crash, although the probability is that there will be none.
Gps and frequency were chosen by more experts than us with the reason where the impact of the atmosphere is minimal. There should be so much water in the atmosphere that the signal is very weak. This can rarely happen but let it happen.
It can never last longer than two hours in any part of the world because physically there can’t be that much water in the atmosphere. Maintaining sync for two hours is fine and bearable but should come back as soon as the SNR is 6 dB with 3 or 4 satellite which is enough.
Why do you need over 20 or 30 dB and a huge number of satellites?
A little more about your GPS problem solving.
Your developers have set up maintenance on the old firmware version 86400 with or 1 day and later on 864000 or 10 days.
That was the last time I contacted your technical support regarding GPS sync. Said problem fixed, boot new firmware and set maximum sync retention time.
If I had a gun I would have shot myself in the leg when I saw 864,000 seconds. After 1 day the oscillator can slide in 200-400 ms.
What then is the frame size of 2.5 and 5 ms, who is crazy here. Every electronics engineer should know that.
The programmer should not know that, but he should consult with the one who knows.
Why do I see this as a problem? Because frequency repetition is useless! After two hours without GPS sync if the APs are with many clients and use IPTV and other stream applications.
How come the engineers and developers at Cambium don’t see it.
Have they ever simulated a situation like this and got chills when they see how it all stops working.
And luckily for them they are never called by some angry user and they don’t swear, threaten or refuse to pay for the service.
As you can see Sakid it is my torment and the torment of many more on the forum we are trying to make a living from WI-FI ISP or network services.

Please be honest and answer which of these two questions of mine is correct?
1.Cambium engineers and developers are not able to solve the problem with GPS.
2.Cambium’s policy is not to want to solve the problem in order to take more money for the accompanying equipment.

Greeting

Zica - I think everyone feels your pain, and understands your frustration. In a lot of ways, I can support and empathize with you. Cambium freely admits they have had GPS issues, and have fixed a number of causes. We all get that. However - what I don’t get is…

If you’re are facing bankruptcy and are considering selling your wife’s jewelry, then refusing to help Cambium resolve the GPS issue makes no logical sense. AT LEAST TAKE 30 SECONDS AND POST YOUR 'TECHNICAL SUPPORT FILES’ here in this forum. If you don’t want to spend the time to open a support ticket… I think everyone could kinda/maybe understand that - but AT LEAST POST YOUR TECHNICAL SUPPORT FILES so that adds to the information Cambium needs to work on. You’re not helping yourself, and not helping Cambium, and not helping any of us who are encountering the same problems by withholding your technical support files.

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Nined
A long time ago, all this with tickets and technical support was “chewed” several times.
There is still no solution, why do it again? To transfer the ball that maybe it’s a problem with me or that I didn’t mount something properly. To persuade me again to climb the towers unnecessarily and waste time.
To be killed by some LTE and the like.
Cambium knows very well that they have a GPS problem.

Yes, they freely admit it. They have and are working on it. They have made progress, and they need people to submit their Technical Support Files in order to continue to improve.

ninedd
Cambium does not need any technical support files. Complaints from all sides have been sent countless times to the GPS problem.
I open the card publicly so that everyone on the forum can read it clearly.
To Cambium:
You know very well about this problem and that it has been going on since the beginning of ePMP.
The question is do you know how to solve it or do you want to solve it.

Okie Dokie - whatever you say.

Customer “My car is stalling”
Auto Shop “Sorry to hear that - OK, let me plug in my code reader and see what’s going on”
Customer “You already know it’s stalling!!!”
Auto Shop “Yes Sir, we know it’s stalling. Let me read your car’s computer error code and we’ll see…”
Customer “NO! Just fix it - Don’t read my computer codes!!!”
Auto Shop “But, your car’s computer error codes give us clues to what’s wrong.”
Customer “NO DON’T READ MY ERROR CODES! Other people I know have cars stalling too – you should know that your cars stall”
Auto Shop “Yes, we know other people’s cars also stall. There are several reasons for that, and we are working to fix all of them. But since cars can stall for a few different reasons, if I can just get the error codes from your car’s computer, that might hel…”
Customer “NO – I’m never ever every giving you my cars computer codes again. That is a waste of time! Fix it without the codes… fix it fix it fix it”
Auto Shop “But Sir - I’m not sure how to proceed… I’m not sure how to find out what’s wrong without those error codes…”
Customer “AHA!! See, you don’t want to help me!”

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But before that scenario, it should be stated that they connected several times, mutilated hours of telephone conversations and countless emails. The result of all that is zero.
It always ended up being perfect on the Cambium side. I don’t take another minute for something like that.
GPS sync is not ok.
As can be seen from the comments from all over the world.
“Please point your GSM pack antenna slightly to the south”
Wait a minute and where do you even live in England or New Zealand? There was nonsense like this too!
This time I won’t let them squeeze me.
Regards

It is true that the support cambium that takes care and time, despite the remote firmware update, the proposal to replace 3000L devices with new ones. It didn’t really change anything. New versions of the software 4.6 and earlier purchase of pucks Teltonika GPS antennas. It completely solved the problem in my case.However, for 4.6 to come into existence, help files and feedback from operators were needed.

EXACTLY! That’s all I was saying to Zica… ‘‘just generate and send them the Technical Support Files’’, that’s all. That takes 60 seconds. Even if he doesn’t want to get into the whole Support Ticket thing… fine I guess, but sending them the AP’s Technical Support Files are not too much to ask to try to help EVERYONE with a solution to the issue.

Zica,
How many ways to connect a light bulb? Do all of them work all the time? You claim electronics engineering knowledge but you dont do the first steps of troubleshooting with the vendor. Once you get to “is it working properly? Yes/no, no start again from step 1.” You give up and complain but do not help forward the cause.

I come from the Canopy hardware days, my company has had cmm2 through cmm5 (borrowed to test the cmm5, not worth the cost IMO). We have the external GPS sync over power already and it has never let us down. Yes it is a major cost of a whole $500USD shipping included to put a tower online with packetflux but it does its job, period. You want to play as a tier provider then you pay for the system and its backup and you work with your vendor until the L3 engineers know you by name and are having coffee with you.

If you are facing bankruptcy then you have more than enough motivation to make this work with whats at hand. You could decide to either sell excess equipment (there are always those whom would take that deal) that isnt really needed (think f200’s and f180’s, these make awesome private ptp links for clients that want to hook up out buildings) or you could look at what you are doing and how to be more efficient at it. This is a small margins business and you shouldnt be competitive with the big guys, fill the gaps where they miss. We still have clients on 4/1Mbps packages simply because they done need more, dont use it often enough and dont want to be paying 5 times the rate for what they dont use enough to justify. From a physical hardware point, dont use 4 radios where 1 will do. A lot of guys hate omni antennas because they can receive from all angles, but they also dont need to be used to cover 16+km either. Micro pops work better than mega pops, 30 clients an AP is a good number and you can place a sector if you need to provide more bandwidth to one area. Dont overgrow your network, expand if you have contracts in an area, we dont until we have 30 contracts pending and then we use that new area to draw others in. And above all else: diversify, we make almost as much on business service contracts as we do off the WISP network. We even still repair telephone systems that others wont, repair old network installations and upgrade networks to fiber to the desk (you would be amazed at what companies will spend just to not have a network issue), since we are a fiber shop we also have ourselves listed with the telco to do fiber repairs (3pm on a friday and a backhoe finds a fiber line are great payers!) Splicers and otdrs are not as pricy as they use to be and opens a lot of doors. Other things, get with Felenasoft and provide cloud surveillance and ad based wifi in parks (work with your local council for this, then sell ad space and force wifi users to click through an ad every 5 mins, chillispot is good for this), we even have a client that needed a fax line but the copper line to his farm was so bad that a voice conversation would bearly go through, a pair of SPAs and we had a line brought in just for him which he pays for and pays us to brisge the line over our network. We have remote data backup services available and we have two separate datacenters that keep replicas for disaster recovery. These value added options give you versatility to survive and grow (look at backblaze for example). None of these side ventures cost a whole lot to setup, nor does it get complicated with opensource solutions.

I do agree that the support ticket system is a bit much, especially when an ongoing ticket gets closed without you being contacted to check status, but at the same time posting tech files is part of your job as a provider. Things dont get fixed if you dont show how they were broken. Including the need for a very strong signal to reset the standalone gps chip. And by the way we have been running on the internal gps radios now since 4.6.0.1 and havent had a single hold off event using the first edition talgos pucks, just to see if it works. Couldnt care less actually other than its nice to have a backup incase an ESD event takes out the packetflux (it happens, even good ESD protection is no match for a pissed off mother nature). With the Canopy radios we used to bring all of the aux ports to a single box and connect the 3 wires needed together to create a single timing point and would set the BH sm to gate the timing off another tower for backup. Hell even your LTE systems have two timing methods, one is GPS based and the other is NTP based, both are good enough of a 5ms frame.

And for the record, GPS frequency was not chosen for its atmospheric abilities. It was an unused band assigned to the US military that was available for the military project that became the gps system we now have. What you are thinking of is the old 40Mhz radiographic system that is all but lost to history. That system needed lots of towers but could place you within a few feet anywhere within the system, problem was enemy territory usually didnt have classified location technology deployed that you could use.