Last week, we had a nasty storm move through the area. I’m not sure what it struck, but a 532A with 2 sectors got fried, along with it’s power supply, the UPS, and the power supplies for two other routers. We replaced everything except the antennas and the switch. Everything seems to be OK, but the CPE is only associating at 1Mbit/s.
Here’s a scan from another radio:
[admin@XXXXXXX_BH_AP2] /interface wireless> scan 0 duration=5
Flags: A - active, B - bss, P - privacy, R - routeros-network,
N - nstreme, T - tdma
ADDRESS SSID BAND CHA.. FREQ SIG NF SNR RADIO-NAME
AB R 00:15:6D:XX:XX:XX XXXXXXX_AP3 2ghz-g 20mhz 2412 -11 -97 86 XXXXXXX_AP3
AB R 00:15:6D:XX:XX:XX XXXXXXX_AP1 2ghz-g 20mhz 2462 -37 -86 49 XXXXXXX_AP1
These 2 radios are identical. The antennas are at the same height, facing 120* apart (one on each leg of the tower). AP1 is where I’m having issues.
Notice the difference in the RF? I don’t know if this is an issue with the radio or the antenna.
Any suggestions?
Here’s some more info:
AP: RB433AH + XR2, ROS 5.1
CPE: RB411 + R52, ROS 3.25 (old, but I can’t upgrade it right now)
It sure can, I’m sure there are few people out there who have had melted gear. It’s not nearly as common as blowing your electronics but in theory the traces on a circuit boad of a panel could be damaged from arcing creating opens or non resonence of the vairous elements. Sectors and Dishes I would think would be more robust. I’ve never seen it myself and I’m gussing it is pretty rare, but lightning can do some pretty funky things. If your antennas are DC ground and everything is properly grounded, the chances are extreamly low.
I don’t know what the situation was before the strike, maybe that difference was already there before?
But anyway, you replaced everything (also the radio card?) except the antenna and its cable…
Guess twice where the problem can be found?
Either the antenna or the cable… I would replace both.
I now know that with 3 sectors, I can scan from each to get a general idea of what I’m seeing for signal strengths, which may help in the QA department. Is there anything else that one can do while on a climb to ensure that everything is operating as expected?
BTW, here’s a couple of (crappy cell phone) pics from that climb… it started getting dark, so we had one of the guys from the VFD pull a rig out and light the tower up for us.
You didn’t mention the physical description of your set up. If you have an external radio to your sector, you can check output power from the radio and the swr of the antenna at the given frequency. This will indicate if you have a damaged antenna.
I didn’t see any mention of surge suppression either, so I assume you don’t have any. I’ve seen a number of installation exhibit normal operation on transmit, but horrible receive performance until the suppression device was replaced (both gas and dc blocking).
Router: RB533A (destroyed)
Radios: XR2 (one destroyed, not sure on the other)
Jumpers: 5’ > dc blocking suppressor > 5’ > sector antenna
Replaced with: RB433AH, XR2, new jumper, old antenna
This question is mostly academic anyways. I was able to re-arrange the customers on that sector, and turn it down until we can climb again (which is waiting for a decision on migrating to nv2). When/if we do attempt to repair this again, we’ll replace the radio first, then the antenna if we still don’t get good performance.
Indirect lightning strike, static got it. Blew the ethernet port, R52H and blew the door off of my power box on the ground.
Replaced the AP with a different unit. I am unsure if the difference is the card, the board or something with the antenna, but that AP always shows 10dB worse on RX than it should, regularly shows customers that would drop into the high 80s/low 90s during bad weather connected at working great at 11mb and occasionally 18mb at -101.
Signal is showing worse but performance is exactly where it was before the lightning strike.
