Hi,
We have a large number of Trango 900mhz equipment already deployed. We are considering deploying some XR9 cards in RB333’s and RB411’s for smaller areas (very rural). Please share your experiences (good or bad) along with configs, examples, etc.
thanks,
Travis
Hey Travis,
I’ve found it about the same with twice the throughput. The MT solution seems to be a little more affected by interference and from what I’ve read on a forum somewhere the lower two channels are best. Id go with 10mhz channel
let us know how it goes on a grander scale
Scott
I had planned to use 5mhz channels, as that is what Trango uses as well. This way I have 4 available channels to try and keep away from noise, and allow co-location of more than 1 radio per tower.
I will be doing some “head to head” testing with MT vs. Trango today (tower has both 900’s on it).
Travis
I hope you have better succes than I had trying to get them co-located 
Let us know…
With all of our Trango’s, we do 10 feet of vertical seperation and usually 4-5 feet of horizontal seperation. Seems to work pretty well.
I know you can colocate trangos - I meant utting a xr9 in the mix - how does that work?
Scott
Well, I’m assuming I would be able to put it on a different channel from the two Trango’s and allow the same seperation.
Last time I assumed that neither of them worked - the trango killed the mt and the mt put some suffering on the trango too - neither happy.
Thats why I am interested in how your tests turn out. This was a sr9 though not a xr9 and I only tested once.
Scott
Ok… this was a very basic, simple test. We have a 100ft tower with two Trango 900mhz on channels 1 and 4 with external 120 degree sectors at about 70ft. We installed the MT with an 8db vertical omni and XR9 on channel 3 (917mhz) and then used a 12db Rootenna with XR9. We were able to get good coverage through trees and other small obstacles just testing from the road about a mile away.
The MT nor the Trango affected each other.
I placed an order today for some 900mhz parts. We will be switching a tower from 2.4ghz to 900mhz (very rural area) this next week. We’ll see how it works in the real world. 
I’ve done a 1 mile p2p at ground level with two rootennas, rb133c and XR9, 1/4 mile of dense pine, the rest was scattered with pine. Signal was at the edge, never better than -79, occasional dropouts in the logs, but never noticed a loss in service.
I just recently got my AP mounted at 100ft, 2.4GHz and 900MHz, and so far the 900MHz signal is much better, however, range is limited by geography. The 2.4GHz goes to the dirt and no further, same as 900MHz. Once I get some customers on I’ll get to tell the differences. With a quick two day “when I have free time” test, I get a -75 with 2.4GHz, -45 with an XR9 in the same location. On the range issue, I did notice today that my connector was loose on my LMR400, needs to be recrimped. It may have impacted the range on the XR9, but I can’t be certain of that yet.
I’m using an 8dBi pac wireless omni as well, 13 dBi yagi for the test CPE.
What channel sizes are you using for each frequency? Are you using Nstreme? What versions of ROS are you running?
During testing, 20MHz channel on 2.4GHz, 10MHz channel on 900MHz. Got pretty decent noise all around the 900MHz band, but I think my location may help in that a bit.
2.4GHz was just standard during testing, running Nstreme, disabled CSMA on 900MHz. Towards the end of my original p2p shot, I enabled Nstreme with my -80 or worse signal and it disconnected much less often in the logs. Again, outages never interfered with usage.
I’m running 3.3 on everything now. I tried to keep up for a while, but haven’t had the chance to try 3.6 yet.
It would be a more accurate test if you used the same channel size for each frequency. I would love to see results from both 5mhz and 10mhz channels on both frequencies.
It would be more accurate, I agree, however, the differences in signal are just huge. I have run 900MHz in 20MHz mode here and had issues with noise, so I didn’t want to use that. I was also using my laptop to scan how far I can get with 2.4GHz without an external antenna. More testing definitely to follow. I’ll likely be using 10MHz channels on both.
I guess another example, the location I have the 900MHz p2p shot working at ground level still has problems seeing the 100ft high 2.4GHz AP.
I haven’t had any luck co-locating XR9’s on the same tower. I have 3 radios on a 150 foot tower, one at 150’, one at 135’ and one at 120’. The 150’ radio has been on the tower for a long time working well on 907mhz, so I left that one alone.
Even with the 135’ radio shut off, I could put the 120’ radio on any channel and when I maxed out the throughput, clients on the 150’ radio would start dropping and throughput on that radio dropped/ping times went up.
All my radios are running in 5 mhz channels, so you’d think that with one at 907 and the other at 922 they’d be fine, but that’s not what seemed to be the case.
So right now, I’m stuck with a system that works great as long as nobody is using substatial bandwidth on any one of the XR9’s. I’m running horizontal polarization on all antennas, and switching to vertical isn’t an option where I’m at because of existing interference.
That’s my luck anyway…
Have you tried with NStreme and CSMA disabled?
I don’t have enough noise or traffic to tell whether it really helps or not here.
I did notice a slight drop in throughput, however, it was still more than enough for internet. I just couldn’t watch Xvid videos over the link anymore. I get the feeling its more to do with Windows networking timing than an actual bandwidth loss. Even the slightest bump over 1ms seems to make Windows networking freak out.
NStream is disabled. Turning it on made the links even more erratic regardless of the other setings, although throughput did increase slightly and pings were a little more stable.