Hi All,
I've been trying to figure out what to use for our next round of radios.
I've not had the time to do as much testing as I'd have liked to. Never did
get a hold of a Smartbridges radio for the testing.
These were all tested in a production environment. The link was a shade
over 4 miles. Very heavy interference in the area.
The AP I have in place is a Compex (www.cpx.com) beta unit. Of particular
note, this is the ONLY AP I've tried so far (admittedly not many of them)
that would talk to both b and g customers. Other G radios (including APs)
would only talk to b radios when forced to b mode. So I was able to take
care of both b and g customers from the same ap.
The AP feeds a 45* Maxrad Adjustable beam hpol sector. I've got 15ish megs
out to Speakeasy from the tower site.
The base CPE is a Smartbridges Airbridge Total. B radio.
Speeds run in the 2500 to 3000kbps download by 2000 to 2500 kbps upload.
A Teletronics Easy-Bridge with a 13 dB antenna attached gave me:
380 down by 81 up in G mode
344 down by 64 up in B mode
A Tranzeo CPE 90 with a 15 dB integrated antenna:
3868 down by 4117 down and 5553 down by 6825 up, both in G mode
An interesting things about this test is that I also ran the tests with the
customer's wireless laptop via the Linksys Wireless G router. Same tests
with the customer's machine gave us 1198 down by 1447 up. And 6063 down by
4278 up.
Baseline tests that day were 2891 down by 2697 up on my machine. 1289 down
by 2012 up on the customer's machine.
A test with an Inscape Data unit with about a 12 dB integrated antenna was
pretty much a flop. The speeds were so slow and unstable as to be not worth
writing down. This surprised me as I've put a few of them into other parts
of the network and they have always (sometimes by twice) out performed the B
radios used in similar locations. I believe I was just too far out from the
tower to get a good enough signal back to the AP due to all of the noise in
the area. My customer has moved so I'll have to try the test again at a
location only about a half mile further than the original test site. I'll
do the second test with an 18 dB integrated antenna version of the Inscape.
I've now tried a couple of the Inscape G APs too. One on a non amped tower
(can't use G radios on standard amps, messes up the signal and output) and
customers have all told me that things are "noticeably faster". On an amped
omni based tower I used one in the B mode. The customer signal data was
very nice (actually dB readout for the rssi!) and the customers all said
that it was running better than it had in a very long time. 7 days later a
storm took out the radio's ethernet port. 4th time I've lost some or all of
the gear on this tower this year! So much for lightning protection on the
coax or the cat 5 runs.
Anyhow, hope my testing helps you guys out. I'm gonna be running the
Inscape and Tranzeo radios for now it looks like. If Smartbridges gets a
good cpe unit that's not all full of junk I'll take another look at them.
Marlon
(509) 982-2181 Equipment sales
(408) 907-6910 (Vonage) Consulting services
42846865 (icq) And I run my own wisp!
64.146.146.12 (net meeting)
www.odessaoffice.com/wireless
www.odessaoffice.com/marlon/cam
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