Bottom line, use MTC surge suppressors top and bottom and your life will
be better.*
*does not work in all cases, all gear will not be unharmed, remember to
take your Pepto-Bismol during storm season
On 5/1/2017 7:06 PM, Chuck McCown wrote:
If I did some cherrypicking, I could get a decent testimonial out of
the text ;-)
*From:* George Skorup
*Sent:* Monday, May 01, 2017 4:56 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] GIGE-APC Surge suppressors
Sorry to hijack, but semi related...
We either had a really bad power surge or a very close lightning
strike at our NOC over the weekend. No visible signs of a direct
strike to the tower. I'm leaning towards the power surge since other
networked things in the office died, and our office telco/network
closet is uplinked to the server room via a pair of fiber. Railroad
stuff was all messed up at several crossings. And other businesses
nearby lost various electronics as well.
Two AF24's and an AF5. GigE-APCs at the bottom weren't burned up, but
were obviously dead. The AF POE injectors all shut down when plugged
into them. The GigE-SS's on top apparently stopped the surge from
hitting the radios. After I bypassed the GigE-APCs at the bottom, the
ethernet links would only run at 100Mbps, plus errors. After bypassing
the GigE-SS's on top this morning, all three are running GigE again
with no errors. So that saved a lot of work today.
However, it wasn't so good for the 5GHz 450i cluster at the top. Don't
know how, but one survived. We relied on the 450's built-in
suppression at the top. Didn't happen. The GigE-APCs were all dead. So
yeah, you should probably just run GigE-SS's near a radio, even if it
claims surge suppression is built in.
The PacketFlux PowerInjector+Sync had two of the ports with visible
damage on the board. Took out the SiteMonitor Base unit with it.
Forrest, if you want these for failure analysis, just let me know. I'd
be happy to send them to you. When I got the office, the green LED was
flashing 2, and I believe port #2 was a damaged one. It also took out
all four of those ports on the CCR1036.
I've seen similar events over the years and this clearly looks like
bottom up, i.e. utility surge. And of course the one thing I forgot
after doing the generator and transfer switches.... the f'n whole
panel surge suppressor. I would've moved the existing one over to the
other panel, but I needed different breakers.
On 5/1/2017 11:22 AM, Chuck McCown wrote:
During a recent solder paste reorder, one of our people ordered a
different solder than we historically have been using. It requires a
different cleaning method than we normally use.
We only recently noticed this when making some new product prototypes.
So, for a relatively short amount of time, the boards have not been
properly cleaned.
We will offer free advance replacements for any of our products
purchased this year just so we can inspect them. I don’t think it
has been going on for a long time but I am not totally certain
exactly when this happened.
If you have anything acting goofy or just don’t to chance it, let us
know and we will ship you some new ones to swap with.
