We looking for anyone who has experience with collocating on towers with FM transmitters. We have deployed a 5.7 BH slave and a single 2.4 Cyclone AP both of which have flawless RF stats (jitter 2-3 rx>-78dbm) at 5.5 miles. The issue is linking to the units from the bottom of the tower with the cat 5 cable; the web interface never loads nor are the units able to pass traffic. We are using shielded cable (although it may be sub par as it cost only $0.10 per foot), have tested the cable, and have swapped out the runs several times. We are greatly interested in hearing from anyone who has stories of successes AND failures under similar circumstances. What, if any, are the solutions for blocking high levels of FM RF?
Can you ping or telnet into the AP’s? It sounds like you arent on the same subnet.
We have 2 BH, 6 5.7 AP and a 900 AP on our tower, and everything ran perfectly until we leased space below our equipment to a 10Kw FM station. As soon as they turned up, our ethernet links to all radios became intermittent and unusable. We forced everything down to 10 baseT and life is better. We are in the process of installing high quality shielded cables and will let you know if we are able to run 100 baseT again when we are done.
Yes, from the far end using an SM. Not, however, from the ethernet connection at the base of the tower.
Ping has started …
PING 169.254.1.12 (169.254.1.12): 56 data bytes
— 169.254.1.12 ping statistics —
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 9.934/14.93/21.08 ms
These stats are rt from the SM (169.254.1.13) located at our office to the AP (169.254.1.12) 5.5 miles away on the tower.
thanks phoneguy. Were you originally using a poor quality stp cat 5 or simply utp?
How far below is the FM antenna and what are your cable lengths? We are above a 500w antenna and below a 1.9kw antenna with 120’ runs. We have ordered stp cat 5 from Best-Tronics and look to install it next week.
Our cable was a decent quality unshielded cable - we installed before Moto announced that the shielding was essential. Cable lengths are almost 300 feet and the FM array is at about 200 feet. I am installing Superior Essex BBDNE osp cat5e cable - really heavy duty stuff that looks like it belongs on a tower. Hope it helps.
Have you tried setting an AP to 10/half (from the SM), reboot it, then ping it from the ground?
Your suggestion has brought us back from the brink!!! 10/half is the ticket.
Thanks a million!!
NO Problem.
It makes sense I guess, our FM station is running 98.something MHz, 100/full runs at about 100MHz and there is lots of power involved.