Which equipment are you using in the ham bands? Have you looked at the AREDN project? https://www.arednmesh.org/ They use mostly Ubiquiti gear with new firmware loads to move the radios to the ham licensed portions of the bands away from unlicensed. The rocket AP’s are one of the models that can load the firmware. Can you achieve what you want by using multiple antennas on a rocket AP? With the AREDN firmware the radios are cheap enough that you could do frequency diversity by having both 5 GHz and 3.5 GHz radios between the sites or if desired 2.4 GHz (in the licensed ham portion of the band below unlicensed) or even 900 MHz (of which ham are primary licensed over unlicensed users with a lot more power allowed). I am a fan of the AREDN stuff because of the clean spectrum available and that it doesn’t bother the WISP deployments. We have been using it for short haul temp stuff like remote video feeds on race courses for public safety events. It is a true mesh platform so if your sites are able to see more than one location from the tower and a particular link goes down, it will re-route traffic on its own.
Thank You, Brian Webster From: AF [mailto:af-boun...@af.afmug.com] On Behalf Of Colin Stanners Sent: Monday, August 27, 2018 11:53 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group Subject: [AFMUG] 5.8Ghz / hackable 5.9Ghz (for hams) spatial diversity on the cheap? 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?
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