EPMP3000 + BEAMFORMING

I have 2 epmp3000 radios to which I load firmware 4.5. I have a lot of latency in the area so I wanted to know if it is already possible to apply beamforming to the epmp3000.

Hello,

Yes, Smart Antenna is already supported starting 4.5 FW version.

There are some issues related to BSA in 4.5 FW we are fixing now in 4.5.4.

Thank you.

So let me see if I understand, beamforming with firmware 4.5 can be installed on my epmp3000. But BSA wait for firmware 4.5.4 ?. What is the difference between beam and bsa?


@yalarcon wrote:

So let me see if I understand, beamforming with firmware 4.5 can be installed on my epmp3000. But BSA wait for firmware 4.5.4 ?. What is the difference between beam and bsa?


BSA = beam steering antenna. To enable use of the optional beam steering antenna you need to be running 4.5. The upcoming 4.5.4 release improves BSA support and fixes some reboot issues.

I'm running 4.4.3 firmware practically on almost all SM and BS from e1k, e2k and e3k. 

Once week ago I would like to try 4.5 to enable BSA on our both e3k BS. In all the week, I received many complains related to low download throughput specially into peak hours. I saw strange download fluctuations so after only one week, I reverted back to 4.4.3 and complains were stopped.

Usually I never upgrade when a version is not recommended yet. Yeah, this is really so.

OK, a bit confussed here.  I am going to be pulling down 2ea. EPMP2000 Radios with Cambium sectors and BF Smart antenna and replacing with 2ea. EPMP3000 Radios with new Cambium Sectors for the 3000 radios and new Beam Forming Smart antennas.  SO... with that said am I hearing that the BF Smart Antenna's are NOT stable at this time with the 4.5 OS?  If a Cambium mod or Engineer could respond that would be great.  Our present EPMP2000's use the BFing antennas a lot.  If I have 50 clients most of the time over 40 of them will be using the smart antenna.  Thanks in advance.

Uh, yeah, I would hold off on those 3000's if you depend on beam forming. Even though the new 4.5.# firmware is supposed fix the 3000's problems with beam forming I have found it's never a good idea bank your customer's happiness on firmware/fixes that don't exist yet and haven't been proven.  

Also consider that the AC stuff needs about 3db more power than N so if you needed beam forming before you are going to need it even more with AC .

https://community.cambiumnetworks.com/t5/ePMP-3000-2000-and-1000/F300-25-less-SNR-than-F200-at-same-RSSI/m-p/115828/highlight/true#M19005

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Thanks.  After reading the post I do believe we will be OK.  First of all we never put up a 70 plus signal with a 200/300.  In that case, only if other factors were execptable, such as lack of fres and tree issues would we even continue with the install, but we would go up with a 30DBi dish and a connectorized 1000 CPE giving us 5-6 DBi more gain and of course going back to N.  We have not tried any connectorized 3000;s yet for CPE's so don't know about that.  Years ago we got tired of dealing with signals in the 70 or 70plus range so we went with bigger dishes, and connectorized for gain or we do not put in the service. But even with what I just stated I'm thinking my guys have not really even notices the SNR difference, as like most of us, the signal is what our eyes focus on!  But as we have all earned, one way or the other, SNR is the important stat for good QOS.  Again, as always in the forums, there is somehing someone shares with me that helps!

Update on replacing dPMP2000's with ePMP3000's:

Today the tower crew pulled up 2ea. back to back 3000's and pulled down 2ea. 2000's.  To qualitfy the install I will list as much info as possible below.

1.  The 2000's had Cambium 90/120 2000 secotors with BFSmart antennas and 2000 radios.

2.  The 3000's that were swapped out had Cambium 90 secotrs and BFSmart antennas and 3000 radios.

3.  The Clients were mostly Force 200 and 1000 connectorized radios with 30DBi UBNT dishes.

1ea. AP had 49 Clients and 1ea. AP had 46 Clients

Radio set at 75/25 and all DS setting are default.  MIght go back and lower them a bit on the main AP radio since we never hit top on those settings.  The 2000's were set at MCS13.  Just wanted to let the default work for a while.  Looks like DS7 is what the DL side is showing on most clients for a max.

Results:  OUT FRICKIN STANDING!

ALL signals were better, between 3DBi and 10DBi Better!  NO 70's at all.  We only had maybe 5 or 8 total and they were low like 70-73.

As has been stated the SNR's on the Force 300 (that's the lowest gain antenna we use) were not as good as the Force 200's, But.... they were VERY good overall.  NO low SNR's on the Force 300's.  I expected not as good SNR QOS as the 300's because of the A/C VS N.

I am personally on one of these sectors at my house with a Force 200 and passed 'Real World" through from the AP to my F200 at 130Meg DL less than 5Meg UL. AS Always Cambium suffers on UL, hopefully OS new releases will help.  I noticed when the 2000's were 0-2 year releases UL's were weak, they did get better as the OS got tweeked.  Hopefully that will happen with the 3000's.

Overall:  VERY pleased.

What I like about these upgrades also is we can go out and pull down some older MikroTik AP's and put up the ePMP 2000's we took down and get good use out of them for a few years.  We will put in F300's with them for clients so when we need to roll higher bandwidth we can either put up 3000L or 3000 radios and get great results.

Thanks for listening to me ramble!  Keep the majic smoke burning!

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