The scenario is attempting to provide an IP telemetry link to a mountain-peak FM radio translator, sometimes called a repeater. The network device is a Mikrotik Chateau LTE6, and the location is New Zealand. The transmitter, repeater, and Mikrotik are in a metal cabinet, effectively a Faraday shield, and the antennas are up a pole; the top antenna is a two bay folded dipole transmit antenna, then a Yagi receive antenna, and then below that a Microtik ANT-205 directional antenna, connected to the Chateau via LMR400 cable. Obviously, with several hundred watts of RF being transmitted, this is a high RF environment, but, mobile phones work next to this setup quite happily. There’s no WiFi needed, just LTE backhaul.
The challenge has proven to be to make this work. There are things we know that we need to address, but the big question is should the Chateau just work in this environment? Being New Zealand, LTE generally means 1800MHz, which is way apart from the FM broadcast band. The FM receiver copes with receiving a signal from 30KM away whilst being close to antennas radiating a lot of power just 1.2MHz away. Could the Chateau be being desensed?
I’ve searched threads, and there’s folks with Mikrotik microwave kit operating on FM transmit towers, but no comments I could find concerning LTE in this type of setup.
Any thoughts appreciated.