We have a tower site with customers across a lake, a few miles from the tower. On 2.4Ghz PMP100 and 3.65Ghz PMP450 platforms, the occasional thermal ducting / reflection across the lake will cause signal loss and slowdowns / disconnections in rare and non-uniform cases.
I had been looking at spatial diversity options at the tower end for a while, but they weren't great. 1) Separate APs+antennas at different heights (at 3.65Ghz frequency ~50ft apart?) - reconnections as the SMs switch APs would annoy customers, and another non-lite PMP450 AP is not cheap for a smaller tower. 2) A PMP450 3Ghz AP in the middle, with each polarization on a different antenna, ~50ft apart in height: the signal loss in the longer coax to each antenna is a big problem and some customers would often lose half speed due to one polarization being low in their location due to Fresnel zone. Now that ePMP3000 has been working well elsewhere on our network, there is option: 3) ePMP3000 with 2x antennas, one main at the AP and another diversity antenna ~35ft lower (~6dB weaker due to loss on the LMR400 coax etc). Avoids all major problems. We checked in the shop and the Force 300-25 SM seems to jump between antennas on AP ports 0+1 and 2+3 quickly and effortlessly, without affecting traffic. This seems like a great option, does anyone see a reason that it wouldn't work?
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