Hi all,
trying to offload customers on 900 ap’s to 5.4GHz and we seem to be having issues with what weve done. let me give you a run down on the setup.
100ft tower with a 900Mhz horizontal cyclone antenna at the top.
we needed to find a way to fix saturation without adding more 900MHz (over 60 customers on the ap and 900MHz is no longer an option to expand with because of a competing company using trango and a lot more pops)
5.4 being new to pmp is wide open for us so we decided to try our hand at that. so we put up an ap, connectorized it and plugged it into a 12db omni antenna (plz don’t grill me on the omni i’m a peon whos always pushing for sectors 
we get good results off one side of the tower and that is it. only the side the antenna looks away from the tower anywhere else and we get no signal at all. has anyone used an omni with LOS gear? its new to us and i’m looking for incite on how it works coming off the tower i’m thinking reflective interference off the tower but i have no way to be sure also any tips on making things work are always welcome
thnx
eric
I can see your future!!
You’ll jack around with the omni for a while until you realize that you are only shooting a mile in any direction and even then its spotty and hit or miss. Eventually your boss above you will come to the conclusion that when a radio shoots 60 degrees it goes much further than when it’s asked to go 360 degrees! Your boss will then give you the money needed to do do a 6 sector 360 degree setup which will shoot further and perform more reliably as each sector does not have to see noise from every direction on the compass. Then you and your customers will rejoice and the your boss will tell you how briliant he is as he has already forgotten this was your idea 6 months ago!
Well i’ll tell ya if that IS indeed my future, i would very much like to see that 6 month timframe bumped up to about last week haha. so it seems to be general consenses that LOS gear is just not ported for an omni and the only way we are going to get good results is by using sectors? any advice on anything we can do to get the most out of the omni?
basically what i see is my boss basically saying unless you can guarantee to fill the AP’s quickly i can’t justify the cost. which i can’t really say i don’t understand but i just want things to work the way they should lol. we have an infrastructure that can compete with dsl but 900MHz just doesn’t cut it anymore advice from anyone is very much welcome TY