I’ve had about 3 or 4 radio’s in the past year that the ethernet status goes to down, yet the ethernet port is set to enabled. Rebooting doesn’t help. Turning the ethernet port off, restarting, and turning the port back on and then restarting doesn’t help. Once it goes down, I cant get it to come back on. The only solution is to replace the radio. Any ideas? Of course they have been working for a couple of years before going down but this is an expensive fix.
CAMBIUM does have a 3 YEAR warranty on the radios, which is amazing and 3x longer than most others. 
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We see this all the time on our older 300-25 radios. I am going to bet money it’s the same issue we brought up that supposedly was probably an isolated batch according to cambium.
The issue is that over time for whatever reason the solder on the ethernet magnetics component fails and the ethernet magnetics chip for lack of better words, no longer make a good connection to the solder pads anymore.
We have resurrected about 40 of these units like this by resoldering that components legs back to the solder pads on the board. You can easily diagnose it once you open up the radio and gently lift up on one side of the magnetics component and you will see the legs on one side lift right up off the board, it’s usually just one side but we resolder both sides
Not sure when this started but again these are older units 3-6 years old and never had this issue on the epmp 200 series. Cambium claims it knows nothing about it or had any other people experience it and it was just us as usual.
The units are no under warranty which is understandable but when you have a flaw like this, I would think they should address it and replace the ones with this issue no matter the warranty as it’s an obvious flaw or manufacturing issue that may or may not have been corrected. I would be curious to know how old your units are. I have a hard time trusting when people say oh, you’re the only one reporting this and were sure it’s just an isolated problem.
Hello all,
I’ve had a customer who provides private networks to cattle feedlots ask me for a solution to a problem that is very similar to this. Instead of resoldering the ethernet jack and components around the jack, they found that replacing the RJ 45 connector refreshes the connection enough that it runs for another few years. They have epmp 1000, 2000, and Force 1xx, 2xx SM’s that has been refreshed with a new rJ45 connector, and the radios continue to work. Some of these are very large feedlots, and I was thinking that maybe the continuous decomposing manure made the enviornment the SM’s are installed in more acidic than normal, and that was corroding the wires in the RJ45 connector. For anyone who has worked for a telco in the past, often on special circuits, sealing current (just a few milliamps) are applied to twisted copper cabling pairs - the job of the sealing current is to maintain the connection quality through the beans and splices in the circuit. PoE does essentially the same thing - the current flowing in each of the 4 pairs should seal the connection and prevent corrosion on the surfaces of the RJ45 connector that touch the surfaces of the RJ45 jack - so theory says, but obviously that is not happening - at least in my feedlot case. I wonder if the process of removing the radio, lifting the board to resolder it, and re-assembling the radio is enough to refresh the connection in the same way that replacing the RJ45 does in my case. Perhaps this is an environment issue, rather than a component or process issue? We have 100’s of customers that this is not happening to, but for the ones that have the issue, its very annoying.
Anyway, I don’t know the solution right now, but I offer this as food for thought.
Thanks,
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