single AP & SM

We have a small backhaul solution that we needed and we had an old 5.7 AP & SM lying around. We figured we could put a reflector dish on both ends and just maybe set the downlink to 50% and it would act like a low budget backhaul. Anybody tried this?

we are currently have. what we call a hot spot. or another cyclone connected to our main cyclone via sm unit. sm in 2x it’s more robust than a 10meg backhaul. we time the hot spot cylcone off our main site with the timing port of the sm unit. been doing it this way for over a year.

fyi- the cyclones are the same freq cyclone. it took some tweeking but it works very good. Low cost to start

We’re using a 5.7 AP with an omni for our shorter backhauls. Works like a champ. The only thing you lose is a little bit of bandwidth. The AP is ready to manage multiple SMs, a backhaul does not need to worry about that. Even though you’ll only have one SM connected, it’s not quite as efficient as a backhaul.

In our case, since we’re feeding 900MHz AP sites, we’ve got plenty of bandwidth to spare going this way. You shouldn’t have any trouble at all, just make sure everything get sync…

Using a reflector on an AP though should be fine right?

Yep, it should work just fine.

Unless you need to go more than 10 miles, use bare AP (and stay within FCC regs). Set the download to 75% as that will give you the most overall total throughput. Set the max distance in the AP to the actual distance. For instance if the actual distance is 9.8 mile, set it to 10 miles. If you set it to say 15 you will lose throughput because the AP will rob data slots to increase the turnaround time window (the dead spot in the frame when the radios switch from transmit to receive mode and vice versa, there are two turnaround windows in each frame). That should maximize your throughput over the link.