In our province there is a wide-area analog voice ham repeater system that's really old-fashioned; some of the radio gear is older than I am. Some more progressive members are pushing to have IP backhaul at all sites. The 2.3Ghz / 5.9Ghz donated-wifi-gear-hacked-to-ham-frequencies group of which I'm a main tech has started building a relatively impressive IP network in the Winnipeg area and so I've been asked to prepare suggestions for the 5.9Ghz IP backhaul upgrades.
The big cost difficulty is doing spatial diversity; there are many longer links that will definitely require it for reliability through the fade season. At my fulltime WISP job, if the budget is $10-15K/link I'll just put in a PTP670 with spatial diversity or 11Ghz radios with 4ft dishes and things are great. But being a nonprofit ham group, this entire project of a dozen+ links is hoped to be <$10K at most (with some donations) for hardware... That's a lot harder. So I'm trying to find if there are any radios that are good at spatial diversity like the Orthogons, but cheap (prefer <$200/radio, $400 max?), and either support 5.9Ghz or are "hackable" to it (while supporting ham requirements e.g. callsign advertisement). Speed is not very important. -PTP650/670 way out of price range, PTP450x, PTP550 too. -AF5X did not do spatial diversity in my tests. -AF5XHD I have never tested for SD, even if it does work the radios are on the expensive side -ePMP connectorized I like as a cost-effective platform, but it's not advertised for spatial diversity, and the firmware had some distance limits -general Ubiquiti wi-fi I've never tested for spatial diversity but is worth a try -Mimosa platform I've never touched but probably worth researching. -Orthogon PTP400s I've used extensively, they are cheap now (used) and do spatial diversity great, but aren't hackable to 5.9Ghz. And as the hardware gets old, there will be failures. Any other suggestions?
-- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
