I have a 90deg Cambium sector that is starting to get fairly loaded (~55clients), so I was thinking about trying to replace the single sector with two sectors and antennas with a much narrower beam width. Any suggestions?
The Ubiquiti Titanium adjustable sectors work well and go down to 60*. The Ubiquiti AC 45* sectors also work well. I wouldn't bother with the Ubiquiti 60* AC sector though as the horizontal pattern is strange and it acts more like a 45*
You can look into the RFElements sector horns - they are produced in 30/40/50/60/70/80/90 degree versions.
But the quick'n'simple approach is to overlay two 90 degree sectors atop one another, maintaining a reasonable split of client load utilizing the 'Preferred AP List' feature.
j
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May I ask you what profiles do you give to your users and what are the performances you’re getting with 55 users?
I suggest RF Elements Horns or two 90 degrees Cambium
We have a mix of 1.5/3/6 and a few 10Mbps subscribers on this access point.
A 5-minute graph shows peaks of ~55Mbps, but I have seen spikes beyond that when watching throughput real time. We haven't had complaints yet, but I can see downlink slot usage in the ~80-85% range (Cambium, please let us GRAPH this value as a percentage!).
The RF elements horns do look interesting. I'm curious how they perform since their gain is lower than a typical sector.
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Very good, I suggest 30 degrees for long distance and 60 for shorter distances.
More than 60 degrees have too lower gain, you should use them only if you’re very close to users.
The interesting feature is you have a vertical beam width equal to the horizontal one, so the signal of your users is the same even if they are on different heights.
Using standard 90 degrees sectors you have only 5-8 degrees vertical, so you can’t cover a whole area with the same signal if clients are in much different heights.