I had a working PTP link using a pair of ePMP Force 4625, that I suddenly lost GPS on. Initially, it was still showing location data, but 0 satellites. I rebooted the radio, and now it’s showing “GPS Status N/A GPS with N/A antenna”
Any ideas I can try, or did the USB GPS just fail and I’ll have to get up the tower to replace it?
You might try physically powering off the radio instead of rebooting it. Otherwise, it’s probably a dead USB puck.
I had this issue a few times. GPS puck needed to be replaced. Hopefully Cambium support sees this and realizes there are reliability issues with these GPS pucks…
We are sending a tech out today to replace GPS pucks at two locations. Power cycles on the customer end were unsuccessful.
We have seen similar results with the 4625 pucks. The three locations are literally grouped together at three houses. I could throw a rock and hit any of the three. We played with the puck placement for quite awhile trying every variation we could think of and this is as good as we could get them. The 4th one is about 1/4 mile away and stays in the “good” category but also varies quite a bit. We have found the 4625 GPS varies quite a bit from slightly in the green to gray, cycling back and forth
The ePMP dev’s are working on a firmware fix to help improve the GPS situation on the F4625. It’s currently in private beta. You might want to ask @Fedor if you’re interested in testing.
I am particularly fond of the fact they locked down usage of third party GPS antennas, the official ones are fairly pricey, back ordered and they perform like garbage. A frustrating situation.
So there’s a few things at play here… one, Cambium had to certify the F4625 with that specific active/USB antenna with the FCC. In order to allow more antennas, they’d need to go through the costly process of certifying those with the FCC. Two, these are active USB antennas, so each antenna needs drivers available for linux… these need to be tested/validated and checked for bugs.
Understood, that makes sense. There’s obviously multiple factors that add up to the frustration. We are looking forward to seeing if things can be improved.
Would that just be to help with poor GPS signals, or does it address the GPS not being detected at all?
If the unit is not detecting GPS at all, then that sounds like a hardware problem, most likely a defective puck. These are “active” pucks so make sure your USB connection is good. We have not had any that were “dead” but others have reported such. Have you tried another puck?
