I’m operating a Backhaul using two 532s with two Atheros AR5213s in each hooked on each end to a RadioWaves dual polarity 2’ dish. The distance is 2.2 miles. For a time, I got -70 on the horizontal link and 54Mbits. The Vertical was weak -80. We replaced the jumper cables on both ends, tried every available frequency, and radio power setting without much change. Since the one side was doing fine and the other was running at least 6Mbits I just forgot about it and went on to other pressing issues. Yesterday, both sides dropped in Rssi reading and we lost the link for a time.
The horizontal link read around -90 (both sides) for signal strength before it gave up and the vertical is reading -70 on one side and -80 on the other which is working at 24/54 Mbits. We again tried every frequency, checked the cabing (now 3’ Heliax jumpers), tried futzing with the connectors on the radio themselves and the pigtails. The working are running at 5180MHz. We ran a CX link on this same dish setup without much trouble and good signal strength.
I’m looking for ideas because I’m running out. Has anyone had this sort of trouble? Are the pigtails and their connectors ever a problem? Is there some magic setting I’m missing? (TX power is now set at default, but we’ve tried lots of settings). Do I have the right radios for this job? Any suggestions would be helpful.
I made some progress on signal strength but here is some strange behavior. I went to change out the pigtail on the vert link, and I though I would first try the other antenna connector on the CM9 to see if that made a difference. I set up in winbox to change from antenna b to antenna a then moved the connector over. When I went back to winbox to make the software change, the RSSI shot up to -62 as if the pigtail was on the wrong connector. All 4 radios are set to antenna b were are connected to the corner of the radio. We determined that antenna b was the corner one in the shop by trial and error when setting up the radios originally. The documentation for the radio at the MT site say Primary is the corner and Secondary is the other so now I’m confused. What is the correlation between the radio A/B setting and the connectors on the board?
RSSI is better now on all radios but the link but rates haven’t stablilized yet.
The current situation is this:
on the mountain the vertical is running at -63 and the horizontal is running at -74
in Town the vertical is running at -50 and the horizontal is running at -69
It ran great for a few minutes but then went away when we set the data rates back up again. We tried many data rate settings to bring it back but the only one that did it was setting town radios to default which is where they are at now.
With it set to default on the town side (configured 54Mbits unchecked on the other) the vertical is running at 48/48 solid. The horizontal link is running between 54 and 6 tx/rx with both sides set to default.
What are the best data rates settings for supported and basic rates? Is this where you set the max rate?