I hope someone can help me, because I’m out of ideas.
We have a highsite with a RB433 (running on 5.25), and three R52Hn’s, two for backbone links and one for client distribution.
The backbone links run on 5GHZ.
Clients link to a 12dBi Omni.
Clients use Ubiquiti CPE’s, either Nano2, Bullet2 or airGridM2 and are from 3 to 16km from the
highsite.
The interface is setup as follows:
1 R name=“Omni” mtu=1500 mac-address=D4:CA:6D:13:48:C6 arp=enabled
interface-type=Atheros 11N mode=ap-bridge ssid=“VondelingsfonteinAP” frequency=2432
band=2ghz-b channel-width=20mhz scan-list=default wireless-protocol=unspecified
wds-mode=disabled wds-default-bridge=none wds-ignore-ssid=no bridge-mode=enabled
default-authentication=no default-forwarding=no default-ap-tx-limit=0
default-client-tx-limit=0 hide-ssid=no security-profile=default compression=no
The clients normally links with signal strengths ranging from -65 to -76.
The problem we are experiencing is the Rx from the clients start dropping to about -88 to -94. If we change the frequency
to something from 2427 to 2447( the 3 highest and 3 lowest channels don’t give good results), all is well for a period ranging from an hour to a day, except that the signals of some clients looks much better than ever before, then the signal strengths drop again. Although we start getting timeouts when pinging clients, sometimes the pings runs normal(2ms average, <1% loss) even to someone having a signal of say -72/-92(Tx/Rx), and CCQ’s stay above 80%.
I have replaced the R52Hn, everything looked good until the next day.
Then I replaced the R52Hn, pigtail, lmr cable and Omni, all new equipment. Next day same old story.
We do sometimes get ESD damage from thunderstorms, but then changing frequency doesn’t help, and we haven’t had any
thunder storms lately.
Interference is unlikely, as this highsite is located in a very remote area, and on top of a mountain with no other wireless equipment close by. We are the only WISP operating within about 80km. There are wireless telephone equipment from Telkom in the area, but the closest device is a repeater about 10km away and not in line-of-sight. I even temporarily disabled
all other 2.4GHz equipment we have in line-of-sight( the closest is 10km away) without any change.
We once had a single CPE causing a lot of trouble on a highsite, so after making sure all clients are on the latest firmware
and all settings are correct I started to change the ssid on a single client and the highsite to get only one client linking to the
highsite( There are only 6 clients on this site). All clients still had the same bad signal.
Changing firmware didn’t help. Playing around with settings and data rates didn’t help.
We have about 40 other highsites running similar setups without problems. This particular site has been working for more than 3 years with the only troubles being caused by thunderstorms and baboons damaging equipment.
As the clients are situated all around the site we can’t use a sector, and multiple sectors is not an option for only 6 clients.
Now after a week the Tx and Rx have both gone bad on the clients, and I need to do something about it soon,
meaning a 70km trip with the last bit a very bad mountain road. Not something you do every day. I am going to replace everything anyway, but if that doesn’t help I’m screwed.
Can it possibly be that the routerboard is causing the trouble? Maybe not reading the signal values correctly?
Any suggestions would be most welcome. Please guys, I’m desperate!