Hi there…
does anybody knows some kind of wind-resistant dishes for Canopy 20 Mbps Backhaul ?
I have some Canopys on high windly places and two antennas have broke due to dish vibration.
I think a grid antenna could be my solution, but i’m not sure if there is some kind of grid antenna to work with Canopys (specially 5.7 Ghz).
I’m stuck :S
Here you go…
http://pacwireless.com/products/GDxx-MT.shtml
We are using one for BH - kinda flimsy so you need to do a custom bracket to make it more stable.
Thanks a lot !!! This is a good new 
how are the dishes breaking? Are the bolts coming loose or is it actually being destroyed? We’ve had problems with the bolts coming loose and dishes pointing down in the ground. We now install self tapping screws in the press fit joints of the dish and that has worked wonders. One gets installed at the base of the mount where the arm attaches to the foot and another at the elevation adjustment.
We do the same thing to the aluminum motorola mounting bracket. We had a huge supply of them and they’re not really meant to hold a SM with a stinger.
btw, the big pac wireless grid is big.
Due to vibration produced by strong winds on Canopy dish, the basis support where the radio device is mounted simply didnot resist and broke.
Another interesting (and absolutely irritating) point it’s also due to wind some antennas move down until Canopy stands inverted (RJ connectors pointing to sky instead the ground) and rain cause them to fail. We are looking how to avoid this in the future.
Jerry,
We just installed our first grid backhaul at 5.7Ghz at a distance of about 7 miles. We’re having problems keeping it connected. It will give a RSSI of about 1600 then jump back down to 200. Is there anything special i need to know about aiming/using these?
Those grid mounts are tricky.
Just make sure they are tightened down very very well.
You might have to upgrade the pole that it’s attached to.
We had some Motorola Dishes on mounts and upgraded to these PacWireless grids and it wobbled in the wind like a sail. We had to re-engineer the whole mount.
Is this co-located with AP’s
Is it in sync?
Is there another 5.7 source nearby?
It is on a tower with 900 APs. There are a lot of BHs up there:
The problem 5.7Ghz 20Mb (slave) is going west and is at 130 feet, we also have a 2.4Ghz (master) at 150 feet goign south, a 5.2Ghz (slave) at 150 feet going east, and a 5.7Ghz (slaver) 10Mb with reflector at 150 feet going north. All our BHs are synced through a CMM at their respective location. The 2 5.7Bhs are not on the same frequency and we thought were far enough apart: 5.77 and 5.840
We have similar problem on one mountain top, 2500 high. I shared this photos once on the forum, so here they are again, following the story what happened in another two winters there:
There are 3 Backhauls on this picture:
http://star.on.net.mk/photo/mrezata_na_ … 03538.html
If you didn’t find them, this is after the cleaning:
http://star.on.net.mk/photo/mrezata_na_ … 03558.html
The clothes didn’t work. Two months after all backhauls were riped off and we lose them on the mountain. The weak spot is were the plastics dish is screwed on the metal plaid that holds the BH.
We put the old reflector dishes, like this one:
http://www.aeronetpr.com/112-1291_IMG.JPG
Since we never loose BH unit, but the wind literally bends the metal there, so we had problems with the alignment.
One of these backhauls is connecting one small city, so we put two backauls pointing in one direction for manual redundancy. We went twice this winter there to do the alignment again, and this was the hottest winter ever.
This summer we will use conectorized backhauls with 60 cm parabolic antennas with radon and heating system. Hope this will solve our problems permanently.
About the grid antenna that Jerry shared link. If the tower is on mountain top which has ice in the winter it will close the holes in which the wind should pass. The surface will be big and problems are possible.
Gay dishes…Why use canopy for the BH in the first place? Get some Trango radios and use these dishes. http://www.pacwireless.com/products/sol … 5ghz.shtml