Steel housing? Not aluminum or die cast zinc? Is it machined out of billet or folded and welded or what? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick Shoemaker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org> Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 8:11 PM Subject: [WISPA] TrangoLink-45 Review
>A few weeks back I asked for opinions of the TrangoLink-45 radios. Since > then I've installed two pairs and figured I'd share my experiences with > the list. > > Physical design. The antenna and radio housing are solidly built and > look like they will last. However, the mounting system is not as well > designed as the rest of the radio. First, it is made of zinc plated > steel, which I suspect will rust after a while. The mount uses a U-bolt > to attach the radio to a pole. This is a problem because it makes it > difficult to hold the radio in place and hand-tighten the nuts during > installation. Since there is no hoist loop in the radio housing, you > can't tie the radio off to the tower and use both hands to tighten the > u-bolt. Also, the mount is specced to work with up to 3" diameter poles, > but there is no way it will work on anything over 2". > > The telnet interface for radio configuration is simple and effective. > Never having used a Trango radio before, it took me about 30 minutes to > be completely comfortable with the radio setup and management interface. > SNMP support looks good but I haven't gotten this set up on my network > yet. > > One little plus is the PoE pinout and voltage is compatible with Canopy > gear- this radio plugged right into a CTM-1m once the timing pulse was > switched off. > > DFS. The radar avoidance DFS on these radios works by using a separate > receiver circuit to compare the instantaneous received power level to a > threshold. Anything coming into the receiver port over that threshold is > considered a radar event and initiates a channel change. In my case, I > had a weather radar tower less than a mile from one of the radios. The > tower transmits with an EIRP of 6.9 GW (yes, gigawatts) at 5500 MHz. > Emissions outside of the radar's licensed band were enough to trigger > DFS sporadically throughout the 5.3 and 5.4 bands. Do a thorough > spectrum analysis before deploying these radios or be prepared to spend > a lot of time troubleshooting later. > > Performance. I haven't done thorough testing yet but I'm getting almost > zero ARQ retransmissions and the highest modulation mode on my 1/2 mile > link, so about 35 Mbps of TCP throughput sounds reasonable. > > Network issues. #1 is that there appears to be a bug with the new VLAN > implementation for the radio's management interfaces. The radios won't > respond to any traffic not originating outside of its subnet. My packet > sniffer shows pings going into the unit from a machine on the local > network segment and one on another network, and replies are only > generated for the machine on the local network. Trango engineering is > working on the problem. Second, I was getting ethernet errors when > connected to a Cisco Catalyst 3548 switch. This was difficult to track > down because there are no CRC error counters available in these radios > and there is no way to hard-set Ethernet speed and duplex settings. > Putting a cheapo netgear unmanaged switch between the Cisco and the > Trango eliminated the errors. According to Trango, they cannot implement > manual speed and duplex settings due to hardware limitations (wtf?). > > Anyway, sorry for the manuscript. All in all, decent set of radios for > $2000. A little rough around the edges compared to the Orthogons I am > used to, but the performance is better and you can't beat the price. > > Patrick > > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WISPA Wants You! Join today! > http://signup.wispa.org/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org > > Subscribe/Unsubscribe: > http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > > Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
