Chad

No. A mystery. My money is on a poor FM install on the tower.

This has been resolved but not sure why. I think the initial problem was related to a new FM station that did some bad grounding. I wish I could say what made it go away but I can't. Which means it will probably come back...

Netonix WS-8-150-DC Switch is not - 48v DC

Took a volt meter up the tower. Can not find any electrical continuity between the Ethernet port (or shielding) to tower ground through the TP. Which is what I would suspect. I'm still trouble shooting where my ground short is happening - or which piece of hardware up there is failing.

Using a Netonix DC powered switch. When we power an ePMP 1000 radio naked (not in the TP), it powers fine. If we install it in the TP adapter which is twisted onto the horn, as soon as we power the radio, it blows the 48v fuse in the switch. We have a dedicated #4 green ground wire coming up the tower for the switch and two ePMP 2000 radios (the 1000 in question had no ground lug). I'm trying to figure out where my ground issue is. Is the ePMP can connect to tower ground through the TP, that helps narrow down the path.

Need some electrical help.... Am using a TP-60 with an ePMP 1000 AP on a tower. We are seeing what looks like some odd grounding issues and I can't narrow down the problem. When I power the AP from our switch and the AP is in the TP horn, it blows a fuse. If I pull the radio from the TP adapter, it does not blow the fuse. The radio does not have a grounding lug on it. The Ethernet has a drain wire that is crimped to the connector at the radio and the switch. Is it possible for the Ethernet connector to hit ground on the top of the tower through the horn? The horn is obviously attached to the tower standoff. Is there an electrical or metal connection between anything on the Ethernet port and the mounting bracket on the side of the horn? It does not appear so but I can't see inside...

Our WISP has been using a combination of RFE Carrier Class sector antennas (120 degrees) and 60 degree TP horns. Up until this last week, the TP horns were on the version 1 ePMP adapter. We just got a few version 2 adapters. These finally allow us to utilize channels below 5.4 and they have reportedly better shielding and isolation. To find out if the marketing claims were true, we started by replacing an existing 60 degree horn with the new TP adapter. At 5.7, SNR and RSSI were pretty comparable. Small improvements but close. However, we moved the radio to a channel in 5.2 and finally it works with no drop off in performance! So happy to have the full 5GHz range available. The next test was to replace a RFE Sector with a 60 degree horn with the new adapter. We are on a mountain with our tower about 1600' above the town. Vertical beam is very important to us. We had been getting very good SNR and RSSI levels along with good speeds on the sector. However, we saw a pretty big jump as soon as the horn was installed. SNR improved by about 10 points. RSSI numbers improved by about 8 dBi from almost all subscribers. And speeds both to and from the subscribers improved. Some of this I'm sure is related to going to a 60 degree beam from a 120 - less noise coming in and we are in a pretty noisy environment. After seeing that performance increase, we took down our other RFE sector on this tower and replaced it with a horn and are not looking back. The only improvement I would ask RFE to make is add a spot for the magnetic GPS antenna to land on the TP adapter or the horn. We still want to use GPS sync but we now get a bit creative with finding a place to put the GPS puck - where it used to sit on top of the old sectors...

We recently completed a four month long shootout between various radio and antenna vendors: http://www.auwireless.net/blog/2016/1/2/testing-testing-and-more-testing Antennas used included the TwistPort, Ubiquiti AC sectors, Cambium sectors and RFE carrier sectors. The results showed the best performance (in our real world environment) to be the RFE carrier sectors. While we loved the TwistPort size, price and vertical beam size, the performance was just not there in the lower 5.1 / 5.2 channels we need to use. The performance of the carrier sector is incredible.

We started a new WISP and prior to launching it, did about 4 months of product testing to find what we felt was the best match for our environment. The final "shootout" was between Cambium ePMP and Ubiquiti Rocket 5AC. Both were tested with and without TwistPort antennas. We settled on ePMP products using RF Elements carrier class sectors (since these APs had to be in the 5.1 and 5.2 range). Our complete findings were written up and may be of interest to some of you: http://www.auwireless.net/blog/2016/1/2/testing-testing-and-more-testing