I've spent the last two days going through my "left for dead" pile of Tranzeo CPQ/5a/SL5/SL2 radios in the shop. Out of 41 radios, I have been able to get 35 of them resurrected, which was very surprising.
To be fair, about 6 of them didn't appear to have any problems at all, a firmware update and a signal level test took care of them. One of the most common failures is the dead ethernet port. In some cases, the port was legitimately dead. However, a bad radio card will also make the ethernet port look like it is dead and cause the board to malfunction. I had a box of old CM9 cards that had tested out okay, so I started dropping them into the "dead" boards and they came right back to life - and are also now 5/10/20mhz channel capable. I marked the bad boards and wireless cards and threw them away. Between the units that had dead cards (with good boards) and dead boards (with good cards) I was able to combine the working parts into several good units. 4 of the units had blown ethernet on Port A, but not on Port B. The 5A and TR-6000 series radios have two ethernet ports, and if the main one is blown out, the secondary one will often still work. I marked the dead ports, upgraded the firmware and put them back in the usable pile. A couple of the n-connector units had broken pigtails internally. That was easy to fix. Two radios had bad ethernet jack/jumpers to the board. Those were also easy to fix. Units manufactured after 2006 or that have spent time in a really hot climate (like Texas) come apart a lot easier. I have two indispensible tools, a long flathead screwdriver and a roofing knife that has one short sharp hooked edge and a longer sharp cutting edge. I can usually pry an edge open with the screwdriver, and then just drive it on down the sides until it splits open. The cutting knife will easily cut through the newer units, but needs some help from the screwdriver on the older units. Putting them back together is pretty simple, although I purposely make them slightly ugly. We have used several different types of sealant to "glue" the plastic front to the metal backplate, and a choice had to be made. Some types will seal together great, but are nearly impossible to get back apart later without tearing the plastic up. Others will be fine for a while, but lose their stickiness and then the face plate falls off. I decided to keep the maintainability and also keep the faceplate on by laying down silicone sealant on the plastic face, and then drilling four holes on the corners and putting a small bolt/washer/nut in the corners. This makes them look somewhat "Frankensteinish" which is probably appropriate - but they are easy to maintain with this setup. Some of the shells/antennas are going to have different boards put in them. Some are going to get WRAP boards with StarOS and a pigtail and will become repeaters. Some are getting WAR1 boards with StarOS and high powered 2.4 cards and will be used as CPEs for difficult installs or power users. Some are getting Mikrotik RB112 boards and 2.4cards and will be used as CPEs - but apparently only in places where we aren't running 10mhz channels since Mikrotik seems to have problems in CPE mode. I really hope that there is a resolution to that Mikrotik problem soon. After dissecting a bunch of them, I have a lot of respect for the Tranzeo units. At least 60% of the failures were bad cards, and those were easy to fix. Most of the board failures had something to do with lighting or power surges, which I would not expect many to survive. Only one of the units showed any kind of water damage, and that could have been an installer's fault. They are tough units that survive both hot and cold temperature extremes, and the enclosures are decent. I still have another 45 or so to go through. Should be fun. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
