Can someone tell me the minimum required distance between the 2 units for this wireless link?
I need to create a high speed wireless link between 2 buildings that are less than 100 ft (30 meters) apart. However, the buildings are large enough that we could position the antennas as far as 500 ft (150 meters) apart (if we placed them on the far opposite ends of both buildings). I would prefer not to place them 500-ft apart because this will necessitate a lot of extra outdoor shielded Ethernet cabling to be exposed outside the building.
I prefer to place the antennas at the locations most convenient for entry into each building and am able to position them high enough to still have a very clear line-of-site 5 feet above the roof of each building (to try to avoid signal reflection off the roof).
This ideal distance is probably about 300 ft (100 meters).
Is that too close? I am told that if we don’t adhere to a safe minimum distance for the products, we risk damaging the products with premature failure due to the excessive signal/power processing they are not designed to tolerate.
Can someone please comment on the minimum safe distance to avoid any damage to these units, and also provide optimal performance?
Thank you very much. This is my first MikroTik project (having come from the Ubiquiti world) and I’m looking forward to working with these products.
Thanks MonkeyDan. By the way I see you only have 41 posts (39 more than me). Do you work for MikroTik? Or what experience do you have with these units to base your recommendation on? As the forum is calling you a “newbie”, I’d like to have the confidence to tell my customer I made my decision based on the recommendation from someone who is not really a “newbie”
Also, can you explain the reason for using the Wireless Wire kit you recommended instead of the RBLHGG-60adkit? I’d just like to have some degree of understanding.
I don’t work for Mikrotik, but do work for a WISP who has deployed over 400 Wireless Wire radios, 50 of which are dishes.
The original Wireless Wire product was designed for distances up to 100 meters and later 200m with software updates. The furthest wAP link we have is solid at about 175m. This is perfect for your distances.
The dishes were designed for up to 1.5 km and in our experience the quality of the link suffers if they’re too close. You used to be able to turn down the TX power which helped, but this has been removed from newer firmwares: http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/w60g-tx-power-setting-gone-in-latest-firmware/123819/1 If you tried to deploy dishes at that range your connection would probably suffer too.
I must ask, did your company deploy the 400 Wireless Wire radios all as Point to Point links (the way they’re marketed), or are you using them as PtMP wireless bridge subscriber units.
It’s a mix of mostly point-to-point and some multipoint with no more than 3 per AP. We’re in a dense urban area and hop building to building hence the large number of point-to-point links.
