When to Deploy Beam Forming Antenna

Question for everyone… when is it actually practical to deploy the beam forming antenna?

IIRC, the BSA helps avoid in-channel interference on the uplink. So you’d want to use the BSA at a site that you’re experiencing a lot of interference that is manifesting as poor uplink modulation for the SM’s.

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Never, it doesn’t work. I bought 4 of them to go on ePMP3000 and after 2 years of them never working I RMA’d 3 of them. I kept one to see if they ever come to life - a week ago I enabled it for a few days and uplink rssi went crazy with horrible fluctuations so I turned it off again. I don’t know if it was false reporting but it made no improvement, thats for sure.
To be fair, i’m in a low interference environment so maybe if the reporting is false, and it was a noisy environment, it may have helped.

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That is exactly what happens to me when I enable mine as well… what a waste of money.

Pretty shocking huh. I bought into this line of products coming from UBNT because i’d heard they are superior - this was based on the ePMP2000, which by all means has excellent reviews by everyone. IMO they released the products 2 years or more before they were ready, and they had some bad luck thrown in with bad firmware issues. It’s starting to come right though so I expect your BSA antennas will one day work well.

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We found the same results. We have 5 3000 APs with the BSA, some with 4.5.6 and others with 4.6. Two are in extremely noisy area. BSA doesn’t help at all. RSSI fluctuations appear to be reporting issue. We tested quite a bit and didn’t see any uplink performance changes with or without BSA.

It’s not good enough. The support guys try to help but there’s obviously a disconnect between the engineers and the support crew, because support have never solved a single problem for me. There’s a 3 year warranty on all this gear so I just RMA’d mine. I would rather they worked. I’m sure it’s all just firmware but one can only wonder why it’s been so bad for so long - two years without working at all …

Wait, that’s an option? I was going to list a bunch of gear on eBay, but if I can RMA it and get my money back, that’s good to know. Thanks.

I was just going to ask if the smart antenna bugs were fixed yet. I tried it last year and when monitoring the wireless, you could see the customers on the smart antenna, and then all would drop and one by one they would reconnect, only to repeat.
It was dropping and reconnecting once a minute or so. From the customer viewpoint, the upload had to be just bouncing… Given the cost of the smart antenna’s I would think this should be a priority to fix. They work great on ePMP 2000.

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I agree, can someone @anon89030143 respond to this? This should be a priority to fix, I tried them on 4.6 and nothing but issues, all issues went away when set to forced sector antenna.

They fixed this issue by stopping making them. I kept one so I would know when they started working properly, and could buy them again, but they never did. I wish i’d RMA’d my last one now as they weren’t cheap.

Yes I was not to happy about this at all!! I wish I had done the same, left with 3 tower sites with 12 paper weights :face_with_symbols_over_mouth: