We had our first heavy snow since deploying two PMP450i 900 sectors and the performance was somewhat surprising. With the 900 Mhz penetration capabilities I has assumed like the old FSK, the RSL may drop a bit but it would be fine. That was not the case.
This was a heavey wet snow with 15 mph winds. Both APs are using KP Performance Omnis. As the storm came through the RSL did drop a bit as well as the modulation levels and then we basically lost the horizontal plane across the board for over an hour with everything dropping to low MIMO A modulation.
On the plus side, we only had one SM drop drop registration, a marginal customer 5 miles out They are one of our employees so they knew it was marginal when we turned them up, but it was that or nothing.
A typical RSL drop was from a -68 to a -84 with modulation shift from 8X/6X MIMO B to 8X/2X MIMO A. Horizontal signal was NA across the board. Obviously frame utilization maxed out during the event, but customers were still on the air.
I’m curious if this is something expected with the OFDM or just something weird with this particular snow event. Possibly the OMNI’s are a contributing factor?
FYI all SM’s are using KP Performance 17 dbi yagis with all signal levels raging from -60 to -68 with 8X6X MIMO B during normal operation (except for the employee) Software release is 16.2.3 on everything.
Previous heavy rain events did not exhibit this behavior on the 450i.
The 2.4 and 5 Ghz ePMP performed basically identical to a heavy rain event, with RSL dropping a bit as well as modulation levels, but nothing this severe. We also noticed that once the storm finally did move through it took awhile for some of the SM’s to regain their original modulation level, in one case, over an hour.
This was some really wet, dense snow, perhaps laced with dust from the debris of an alien space craft or something.