POE Force 200, solar

Hello,
In advance thanks for the help. I want to switch my electrical connection to solar connection and well, I mostly use Force 200 antennas.
The query is whether using the following product:

You could connect a 12v battery directly to the Force 200.

Spec sheet for a force200 says it goes from 10v to 30v so you should be fine there.

Your mikrotik adapter only does 18v-56v though so it probably won’t work.

That MikroTik adapter is totally passive - is just a cable - so it’ll POE out exactly what you put into it. So, if your solar batteries are in 24v configuration, the batteries should range from 21.2v to 29.6 volts (depending on their state of charge) and the Force 200 and the MikroTik POE cable should be happy with that.

thank you very much.

But and in terms of cable pins, would the distribution be fine? What if I do the test with a 12v or 24v battery but the distribution of the cable pins is wrong? Could it go bad or just not turn on?

Maybe someone has experience?

The Cambium ePMP Subscriber Modules, and the MikroTik subscriber modules both use “passive POE”, with the voltage going down pings 4/5 & 7/8 and while the ethernet data goes down 1,2,3,6

The only trick is that all MikroTik use 4/5 as + and 7/8 as -, while some Cambium radios use a reversed voltages. MOST Cambium ePMP radios are “voltage agnostic”, meaning you can send + down 4/5 and - down 7/8, OR you can do the reverse and send - down 4/5 and + down 7/8, and for most of the ePMP SMs they will detect and use either way.

ALSO - the ePMP’s should not be harmed (in my experience) by sending voltage the wrong direction, they simply won’t turn on.

SO - if this was me, what I’d do is to connect the batteries in 24 volt configurations (since that’ll be more efficient for your solar charger anyway) and then fully charged 24 volt batteries should be 12.6 volts each, so 25.2 volts in ‘24 volt configuration’. Then I’d plug that into the MikroTik POE Injector (or any POE injector) and I’d put ‘positive’ on the center of the barrel, which should be down the 4/5 pair of wires, and I’d put negative on the ‘shield’ of the barrel connector, which should go down the 7/8 pair of wires.

I would expect that will work fine for you with a Force200 - since the Force200 (both 2.4ghz and 5ghz versions) work as power agnostic +/- or -/+ for us. They are also happy with 24v or 30v or a wide range, so your solar batteries will range through the day/night from ~22 volts to ~29 volts, and the Force200 should be happy with that.

DISCLAIMER: I full expect that you can put 12v or 24v, either “forward polarity” or “reverse polarity” and I expect it’ll all be OK. As long as you don’t put in more than 30v, which shouldn’t happen with batteries in a 24v configuration with a 24v solar charge controller - and the charge points set correctly. However, YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. :slight_smile:

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Thank you very much.

When you refer to mileage you mean the useful life, right?

I will buy a Mikrotik powerbox pro MikroTik Routers and Wireless - Products: PowerBox Pro and I will try to connect 3 force 200 with a 100 AH battery in 12v to see how it works and then I will try with a 2 12V batteries each of 100 AH, I will tell you how it went.

It’s just something I say when I mean, “This may or may not work the same for you
 don’t blame me!”. :slight_smile: So, I just meant that running two 12v batteries connected in a 24v configuration should be safe - but, ‘your mileage may vary’ (meaning, it works for me, but don’t blame me if something blows up for you!).


Also, for us,where we have Solar, we have 12 or 16 batteries, 100 AH each — so we run battery banks of 1,200 AH to 1,600 AH.

We dont use microtik but we do have all dc sites and the only thing you have to worry about is placing a small fuse between the passive poe injector and the battery/charge controller.
We even have voltage controlled relays that ensure at our specified low battery voltage the radio power is cut rather then run the batteries down to far and hurt them.

We are using two 40AH tractor batteries in series for 24v and have no problem keeping a tower with two ptp and 4 ptmp up for 30hrs. On sites that we figure need more or the location of the site is inconvenient to get to, we simply parallel more battery sets in with a reverse current diode (plan for at least 40A) on each battery set. This works very well and since most good solar panels are nominally 24v (28 to 32v-oc) so a simply charge controller and appropriate fusing is all thats needed.
We even figured out how to convert our cisco switches to use battery power without needing an inverter.

hay algun foro en español, tengo full problemas con la antena force 200 a una distancia de 1km, hay algun lugar donde me pueden orientar

Hola,
Bienvenido a los foros.
Sí, hay publicaciones en español y el equipo de Cambium es bueno trabajando en español, pero no publiques respuestas fuera de tema en un hilo. Simplemente escriba su pregunta sobre un tema nuevo y nosotros, dentro de la comunidad, trataremos de ayudarlo a usted y al personal de Cambium.