Thanks. I’ll be ordering some once I know they fit. I can’t keep having all these customers go offline every time it snows - in Colorado…
I’ll be testing an upside down radio next week as soon as my glands arrive! Hopefully Cambium waterproofed the bottom of the radio as well as the top of the radio since mine may be going 180…
I’ll be curious how rotating it fares. A few weeks ago wet snow took out our few v3000s. Very frustrating. We are in MO so not a ton of snow usually but still not gonna fly.
Yeah, going to admit the bag on the dish isnt a permanent thing but better than caking an antenna in frozen snow.
This issue with the scoop is the main reason we dont have them yet. We get too much snow to deal with links down.
I can’t imagine the retail shrink bags lasting long in the outdoors, definitely need some serious radomes for these if/when I roll them out. I might have a go at the industrial grade shrink wrap when I get my hands on one.
A bunch of snow is predicted here mid week. How goes the experiment?
The only solution we have found is to cover the weep hole and mount the radio upside down.
OUCH . Where is the legendary Cambium support I always heard about when fighting with ubiquiti gear ?
Perhaps we need to set up a go fund me radome project …
1 Like
I hear the 3000 works really well as a scoop shovel. I don’t understand how it is possible after over 20 years of designing integrated wireless equipment, do we come up with something so STUPID as the 3000 reflector
2 Likes
Hello @amishgenius welcome to the forum. You’ll find the V3000 has many benefits.
I hear the the 40dBi is ideally suited to stairs and walkways while the 44.5dBi makes quick work of the driveway. Seriously though, who designed this thing?
1 Like
Please keep personal attacks off the community. Complaining about the functionality of the product is fine, but complaining about people is not. Thanks.
One of the many benefits include catching snow?
1 Like
The V3000 design allow a multiple patch radio to maximise the power in a relatively compact form.
The 60dBi EIRP from this radio, would normally need a 2ft dish to provide the power. The fact that it can utilise all the patches on a tile means that the conducted power can be combined, it doesn’t have to drive each of the PAs as hard and reduces the EVM impact also giving a cleaner signal.
In addition to the power, you also get beamsteering which allows you to not only align this accurately but allows for small movement.
Snow on the dish will cause the availability to drop, we see ~15-20dBs (it’s the ice layer rather than the snow), some links will adapt both with ATPC before resorting to Modulation modes changes as the RSSI drops.
We have thousands of V3000’s in the field globally but understand those in regions with snow and without this significant link margin are suffering.
We at Cambium do take this seriously and are working with a number of customers to support them with different options as we trial these. Frankly as with most radomes hydrophobic paints are effective but we looking in to other options.
3 Likes
Hi Simon,
I’ll respect that going forward.
Ultimately, though, the functionality of a product boils down to someone or someones sat around a table and said “this is good”. How this happened to a product which actively catches snow and makes it not work is beyond me. Therefore I do believe some corrective action to the persons who designed this is necessary. Perhaps they were new to the industry?
I get all of that - but why is it a scoop vs a flat panel? I would gladly take a 2ft dish over this – or some kind of a radome.
It’s a scoop because it is parabolic, I get the idea that with the feed facing down it beats a number of weather issues, but the lack of a radome negates its utility for way too much of the year here in the great white north
We have been in very close contact with Cambium about this issue. Being in Colorado with a number of snow storms this season, we have had our issues. One idea was to mount the radio 180 degrees (upside down). After talking to engineers, this is not something we are going to try. There are some engineering caveats to this idea that will likely make other problems worse.
I think we will see 3rd party radomes (like the ones for Mikrotik LHGs) come out and probably a product or two from Cambium for those of us in snowy environments.
I can confirm the ice is more of a problem than the snow. We had a 8" storm last night but it was 10 degrees F and less than 10% humidity when it snowed. A very dry snow. No links lost. The previous storm was in the 20’s F and iced up the dishes and we lost links in that storm.
We are able to get links at over 600 meters to a V5000. That is impressive for a PtMP product in this frequency. We are also pushing well over 1 Gbps on V3000 PtP links, also not something we could do with other products in this category. We have deployed IgniteNet, Siklu, Mikrotik, Kwikbit, UBNT and Cambium 60 GHz radios. We are very happy with the performance of the cnWave gear. But, there is an icing issue that I know they are well aware of and working on fixing. The product is solid, the design needs some tweaks.
5 Likes
Could you perhaps tell us a little more about the engineering caveats that could happen with an upside down mount? It would interest me very much from a technical point of view.
Many Thanks