We're getting ready to send back 25 out of 90 or so new horns. We still have 10 more to go since we purchased 100 in total in our last shipment. So there will probably be closer to 30 out of 100 that were bad. For us, it has ZERO to do with the AP since we keep trying feedhorns until we find one that have balanced chains.
Once we send them back and hear from Cambium, we'll post an update. I encourage all of you to open an RMA and reference this thread in it.
That's pretty unacceptable. 30% failure rate. Can we get a comment please?
I'm about ready to sacrifice a unit and break it open to see if there's anything obvious going on.
Did cambium ever acknowledge this was a defect/problem ? Just got a new batch of F200's in two weeks ago and so far at least 2 radios have 10dBm+ chain imbalances (lots of very bad storms the last couple of weeks so not much installing going on and I just moved into a new office and don't have a way to bench test for this yet). Once I caught when I was installing it , the other was just swapping out a stormed killed radio and didn't catch the chain imbalance until I got back to the office so that's a 2nd truck roll and mostly my own fault.
Just got another load of them in Friday... really hoping this has been dealt with though the curled Ethernet pin thing is still going on so not much hope they have fixed anything...
Hello all,
We received 25 replacement feedhorns from our RMA and will start deploying those to see if they're fixed or also have the same defect. We did purchase a batch of new ePMP Force 200 with the new MAC address format 58:C1:7A:xx:xx:xx and we are still finding some of those with the large chain mismatch as well. We'll pull all of them out and RMA them once we get through that batch too.
Here is Cambium's response after we asked if they still wanted us to send back the 25 bad ones we have. They told us they don't want them.
Cambium response: We already have few defectives from other customers and our engineering team is working on it to find out the issue.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Regards,
Chaithanya Reddy
Lead - Customer Care Team
Cambium Networks Global Support
Well the F200's we got in Friday had firmware versions from 2.something.rc-something to one box with 3.5. Unfortunately our process is to do firmware upgrades right out of the box so by the time I got around to testing them for chain imbalances I didn't know what radios came with what firmware (am assuming newer firmware version means newer radio). That said, it was just 6 cases, 24 radios, and 4 of them had the 10dBm chain imbalances.
Also somewhat concerning was that while most of the radios constantly had -61 to -63 RSSI in my test set up there were several that constantly got -65 to -66 RSSI for some reason (the RSSI on each chain not the combined RSSI so where most radios were -62/-62 these were -65/-65). When I say constantly I mean I started writing the chain values on the radios when I first noticed some seemed lower than others and when I was done I re-tested the radios with the lower RSSI and they again had -65 to -66 where most of the other radios got -61 to -63 (even the ones with the chain imbalance was like -61/-71). So no chain imbalance just weaker RSSI than other F200's. Don't think I've ever really noticed this on the F180's but then so far I don't have a reason to test the 180's before they go out for installation.
So I guess on top of gaps in the ethernet opening letting bugs into the radio, chain imbalances, curled ethernet pins possibly causing reboots and other ethernet problems, I can add some F200's have weaker RSSI that I now need to test for and find out if it gets worse at longer distances. If it does we will have to start testing for that and either RMA them or make sure we use the weaker F200's on the closest shots...
Glad to see I am not the only one with curled Ethernet pins. Had 3 of those pop up in the last couple of months. Radio will work fine for weeks or months and then die or loose link to the router behind it but stay powered up. We finally roll a truck (after assuming the end user did something stupid) only to find out a couple pins in the radio are stuck in. First we blamed it on using dielectric grease on the connectors before inserting them. Then a couple radios died where we had not used that grease ever.
No to go look at my Force 200's for chains.
Hi all,
Please open a ticket with Cambium Support Team in case of any HW issues have been observed.
https://www.cambiumnetworks.com/support/
Thank you.
Got some F200s in day before yesterday and this time I just drug the whole thing out to my test setup and tested them right out of the box. All 32 F200's had 2.4.3 RC16 on them so these had been setting somewhere for a long time (2015 ?). However they all also have the curled Ethernet pins so not sure how old they are.
None had the 10dBm chain imbalance though with only 2 exceptions they all had about a 3dBm chain imbalance (all but two had 61/64 with one having 63/64 and one at 60/62).
Just FYI.
Got 24 F200's in. All had v3.5.2 firmware so these were fairly fresh off the boat. All still had curled ethernet pins, all but 4 had about 3dB chain imbalance with 3 having little or no imbalance and one having the 10dB defect (yes we will RMA this one).
All had large bug friendly gaps between the ethernet port and body of the radio.
It seems the PCB inside the horn is just slapped in willynilly and since the ethernet port is attached to the board it may be flat up against the front of the hole in one horn and flat up against the back of the hole in the next one so sometimes the gap is in the front, sometimes in the back... this also means the antennas at the other end of the PCB are not in the same place in relation the reflector in the end of the horn or the dish (because the reflector/shielf or whatever it is is attached to the body of the horn not the PCB). I don't know if that has anything to do with the chain levels or not but seems like it could.
Looking forward to the day that the 10dB chain imbalance is so rare that it's not worth testing for any more because testing the radios for huge chain imbalances it's a time consuming PITB...
Are you guys seeing these issues on just the 5GHz flavor or 2.4GHz or both?
I'm still spending hours of my time testing every F200 that comes in for the 10dB chain imbalance because we are still getting F200's with the 10dB chain imbalance. It's also a huge PITA to go through and test every single radio or not test them and find them the hard way and then find out your spare also has the problem.. We have two PTP links with this crap because even the spare was bad. There were two yesterday in the batch that came in, all 3.5.2 firmware.
It would be really nice if you would at least acknowledge this something you are working to fix... because right now I'm getting really tired the F200's and since it appears the F300-25's have the same problem there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
Hi brubble1,
The process is in place to test all the units for chain misbalance at the factory. If you have any F300-25 with this issue please send me support ticket numbers at dmitry.moiseev@cambiumnetworks.com
Thanks,
Dmitry
Is this process also in place on the F200's ? Can I expect to stop getting F200's with the chain imbalance in the not to distant future ?
Is this a process that was put into place recently ? The F300's I have I had been setting on for over year waiting for DFS (but someone else posted recently about having F300-25 with 10dB chain imbalance, no idea how old their F300-25 was).
Hi burbble1,
You should not get any F200 with this issue.
On the early days of F300 we used to have an indication issue of wrong noise floor measurement that showed as a chain misbalance. Please let me know if you still see this on any F300-25 with the recent firmwares.
Thanks,
Dmitry