Nodes co located at high RF sites

4 posts / 0 new

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 08:24

VK1MIC

Hi all,

I am gathering info to appease/placate a very particular RF engineer who also happens to be a gateway to multiple great sites for backhaul or longer-range urban fringe mesh sites.

What nodes do you have deployed in high RF sites, such as co-located with repeaters and or commercial installations?

Do you have any details on your install? ie external antenna? or all in one?

Cheers
Wade VK1MIC

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 09:42

K6AH

Generally UBNT Rockets

My high-ground sites have a combination of backbone (point-to-point or PtP) links and distribution (point-to-multi-point or PtMP) links. The PtP links are generally Ubiquiti Rockets (M3 or M5) with RocketDish antennas and the PtMP are similar Rockets with 120 sector antennas. Often in commercial environments RF Armour is necessary.

Recently, MicroTik has released some high-performance devices which perform very well in these roles, but I have only used them for "deployed" access to the network, not as components of the backbone and distribution.

Andre, K6AH

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 10:17

KK6DA

Mt. Wilson in LA

Wade, in June 2018, Southern California AREDN members installed three sector antennas on Mt. Wilson (6-thousand-plus feet) above Los Angeles — two 5 GHz Ubiquiti sector antennas and one 3 GHz sector antennas, both unshielded. Mt. Wilson is the location for all commercial television transmitters and antennas, so it is a “bath” of RF in the millions of watts at roughly 500 MHz band. Our sector antennas sit specifically at a commercial transmitter generating 1.5-million watts ERP. There was great concern that our AREDN antennas would be overwhelmed with all that RF. In fact, they could care less and he 3 GHz and 5 GHz units play nicely and effectively with millions of watts at 500 MHz.

Here is a video of the installation in June 2018: https://vimeo.com/278946281

Hope this helps.

David Ahrendts, KK6DA, Los Angeles

Fri, 04/03/2020 - 11:48

AA7AU

It's a noisy world out there

In Las Vegas, we found that our 2.4GHz nodes tended to become deaf when installed on places like Red Mountain, Apex Peak, etc where there was a lot of commercial RF especially big/plentiful Microwave links etc. In general we were able to effectively use 5,8GHz nodes in the same location with pretty good success. Believe me, we tried everything we could think of the "armor" those 2.4 nodes, at one point even using a huge old legacy shroud pointed across the valley for PTP, but no joy.

I have a similar issue up here in the mountains of Idaho where we get so-far unexplained [non-patterned] packet loss thru a very nice armored Ubiquit 2.4 sector antenna - the result of a our local AM/FM/Wisp operations close by. As we have to live with that unit, I keep hoping we can find some easy and inexpensive "notch" type filters for the wire connections between the Rocket and the antenna ... but I'm only an old software/systems guy, so hardware sometimes befuddles me.

Good luck,
- Don - AA7AU

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Nodes co located at high RF sites