I’m installing a CMM with 5 AP and 1 BH on a radio tower full of high power radio antennas.
The radio electromagnetic power is so strong that I burn my fingers when working with the ethernet cables. You can hear the radio from the CMM power transformer !!
With normal shielded cat5 cables nothing works !
So I shielded all cables with metal flexible tubes. Eth. cables are max 2 m long. The power suply is closed in a metal box next to the CMM.
The 220V power suply cables runs up the tower for 20m and it takes up a lot of interference.
I got some improvement but on the ethernet cable is difficult to kip the 100Mbpsfull duplex and some times the the power transformer stops working.
What sugestion do you have : to use a filter before the power transformer ; do any filters exit for the ethernet connections against radio interference ?
In these situation what is the best grounding for the CMM and the power suply ?
If the power is so high that you burn you’re fingers while working on the cables then you probably shouldn’t be working on the cables. Most high power equipment needs to be turned down for tech’s to work on site that close. Their is nothing you can do to eliminate the interferance other then move to a different location. Most surge suppressor’s will fail under that kind of situation.
I dont know if this will add to your thought process but let me share my experience with using Canopy on an AM (live) tower.
This AM tower (like most) is actually hot, so you can’t climb it with the station transmitting. Most of the radiated energy from the tower was from 1ft off the tower outward. Those that have seen the AM towers with a “steel cable” running up will know what I am referring to.
We bought the best HEAVYILY shielded (solid copper shield) and ran three wires up to start. We simply wire tied them to the inside of one of the tower legs. We found that we had voltages directly on the cat5 (copper shield) that was closet to the leg (touching the most on the way up), so much so that it was too intermittent to use.
The other two we stripped off the outer jacket at the bottom of the tower, grounded that to a tower ground. That worked wonderful for the 4 years we were on that tower. However, we were not able to use Moto Ground Blocks as they died pretty frequently.
For dif. reasons, we decided to elliminate that tower from our network (closer, better one nearby) but I spent some time with a really sharp RF and electrical engineer there as we were taking equipment down. He suggested that indeed what we had was the right cable to use, but that it should have been grounded (jacket removed and ground strap) to the tower every few feet coming down the tower.
For what its worth. I dont recall the cable we used, but I still have some in the back of the shop if you want the make/model to try it.
I am interested in knowing the brand of cable you’ve used.
Forcing the ethernet to 10mbits made it work.
But now i need more than 10mbits.
The other solution would be to run a fiber and use ethernet converter at the top with short shielded patch cord to the radio.
I’ve tried ferrite beads without much success. Some said it works great for them.
Maybe you could run the CAT5 in metal conduit like EMT to help shield it.
We ran through problems like this on a tower with AM/FM transmitters…but we didn’t use Canopy…
We used 802.11b routerboards with mikrotik. We had a lot of problems communicating with the clients of our 802.11b card…what we did was to keep as far as possible our power supllyer cables from the RF cables of the AM/FM transmitters…We also protected our ethernet cables with plastic tubes.
Maybe this is a stupid idea… but… run 2 runs of cat5 the same length. use the orange and green pair from one, and the blue and brown from the other when you crimp the head on to eliminate the crosstalk within the cable its self.
The metal conduit is probably the best suggestion… i think…