I’m using mrtg to keep an eye on our backhauls and customers, to watch for signal strength changes that might be a radio, cable, antenna, etc going bad. As I’d expect, I see daily variation in the signals based on sunrise/sunset, nice sinewaves for a few db change throughout the day.
However, I’ve also found sudden instant changes of 15-20db, sometimes at the same time a couple of days in a row, on both 2.4 and 5G. It looks exactly like somebody throwing a switch. My boss thinks the radio is lying to us, that something in the driver is getting confused.
Hello,
to me this looks like a specific weather issue.
Temporary signal level drops over long radio links are usually caused by severe weather conditions and
weather differences across the signal path.
Thermal inversion causes refraction of the radio waves with such high signal level drops.
The longer is the link the greater is possibility (over time) for this natural phenomenon to appear.
I’ve seen this mostly on 20km or longer links and it can take them down quickly and completely for minutes or hours if their signal fade margin is not high enough.
You can’t do much to prevent it except to increase the fade margin by using higher gain antennas.