Force 300 frequency range

Hello all,

We just started deploying Force 300 and it appears it can’t see AP’s running on 5740 in 20mhz channel width? Is there actually a problem or FCC cert that doesn’t allow Force 300 to see 5740 or 5835 for example, something near the edges of the UNII-3 band?

This is a huge problem if that’s the case. We have lots of AP’s running on 5740 and 5835 so if these require frequencies narrow than this range, these are pretty useless to us.

Thank you

I know the e3k series has a reduced channel set due to more stringent FCC cert process. That being said I checked a force 300 and it shows 20MHz channel widths available from 5745 to 5835.

This is a huge red flag. Newer gear should be able to better qualify for certain frequencies and have cleaner band emissions than older gear.

Can Cambium recertify this gear to allow 5740 to 5835? We don’t want to go through the entire network and shift AP’s on 5740 to higher than that and then have us push other AP’s to make room for the channel shift. This is a huge inconvenience and might make our network perform worse because of finding clean channels in heavy interference environments. Sometimes 5740 is the only clean channel and moving it isn’t possible.

My magic 8 ball says “Very doubtful”.

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Well this gear certainly just became way less attractive to us. This is supposed to move us forward, not limit our options to fewer frequencies than older gear.

Being somewhat privy to how the e3k was designed, cost is a huge consideration, this is for instance why there’s no 5/10MHz channel support, like there is in the e1k/e2k. My best guess, is between the FCC tightening spectral mask requirements, and an effort to keep e3k affordable, that these concessions were made. On a positive note, you can get an FCC STA for using these radios in the 5.9GHz range… which should open up some additional channel options for you.

We don’t need 5/10mhz support in 5ghz. 20/40/80mhz is plenty so that’s not an issue. Losing access to channels that we have on 1/2k and Force 200 is a problem.

We considered applying for the FCC STA but that is only temporary as of now. It’s not worth the hassle of having access to “Clean Spectrum” but then having to revert to busy spectrum after 90 days. Don’t we need a special firmware to run on all the devices to make it work too? Sounds like a hassle unless you’ve seen different.