Here is the scenario, two buildings 555 metres apart, on each building:
RB600
4 x R52 cards
4 x u-fl to N female pigtails
2 x 1m LMR600 cables
2 x 8m LMR600 cables
2 x Pacwireless Dual-Pol 29dbi dishes
The first dish is mounted on the same pole as the radio unit, the second is on a pole 4 metres away.
We are performing a layer two bridge, using EoIP and bonding.
My question is this, when I worked with Proxim Tsunami 5054-R units, if the signal strength was too high you would see all sorts of funky things, such as dropped packets, duplicate packets, connection freezes.
At this distance, and with these antennas it is likely I will get a very good signal strength. Am I likely to experience the same problems with the Mikrotik gear as what we did with the Proxim gear ?
I’d cut the tx power as low as possible. You might still have to use an attenuator in line to lower the signal level.
I can’t speak for the r52, but WRT54G, XR9 and SR9 don’t work well above -40. I’ve seen signal at -38 cause the speeds to drop to 18Mb from MT to MT with the 900MHz radios and the Linksys routers. With a Windows XP client, CM9, and a CM9 in a 15dB Rootenna, the signal in the -20’s didn’t cause a noticeable issue, although I did not do long term testing or even bandwidth testing at the time. I simply did that in configuring before long range testing.
At that distance why don’t you just simply use lower gain antennas to reduce your received signals? 29dBi seems like it’s quite excessive for that distance. I’d go with something more in the 15-19dB range.
Just FYI, in setting up my 2.4GHz AP, 5.8GHz p2p bridge units here, 4 W EIRP AP and 400mw + 15dBi rootenna, anything over about -40 has pathetic CCQ, 20% or lower.