MikroTik

http://www.ubnt.com/products_xr9.php4

I noticed a new 900mhz card from ubiquity the XR9 it is NOT compatible with the SR9 and there is almost no other info, except to say to was designed to operate in harsh RF environments. Anyone have one yet and have you tested against Canopy? Could this be the 900mhz solution we need?

Hey mike can you shed some more light on this product?

Erik

If you look at the forums here and at ubnt.com, you'll see the discussions about this card. Mike says he's waiting to hear more back about how it works with Canopy. The card won't be available until around the middle of the month, so nobody other than their chosen "testers" should have them yet.

I'm sure you'll see tons of info in 2-3 weeks.

Joe

Not quite true. They are definitely in the distribution channel already. Wisp-router got a bulk shipment Friday, they shipped immediately so ours are in customs now. Might have them tomorrow, more likely Thursday.

George

Cool, I was just going by what I was told... I'm glad to see them out there.. hopefully we'll start hearing more info sooner than I thought!

I got the 10 that I ordered Monday from Streakwave. I will be deploying a 900 AP tomorrow and will have a couple of customers on it by the end of the week.

Sorry about not checking for old posts, I go back and dig them up, I'm out working or our network and 24k dial up does not work well for a lot of searching!..... with a little luck our network will reach my cottage by this weekend

We are all dieing to here the results, particularly how it stacks up against the evil moto..... looking forward to all your posts.


Erik

slipstream1 or anyone else who has any of the new cards: did you get a chance to try these out at all yet?

I got 2 of them, and so far, I can barely make a link work. 3 miles almost LOS (it works at 2.4 and 5. I have -93ish signals!

I'm suspecting that I have a bad pigtail or something or maybe got a defective card... The noise floor is actually a couple db worse than the SR9 at a similar freq, so something seems wrong.

I'm hoping that they turn out to be much better than this. Hopefully I can check the tower and connectors tomorrow.

Joe

I have the new XR9's h installed on 1 tower. We got rained off of the tower and did not get a chance to finish the installation. I will have word on these things by the end of the week. Remember, elevation is everything with 900 mhz. Keep them low and they should work better.

I got a chance to replace the 5' coax I had on the tower and that fixed my problem. Must have had a bad end as the signal went from -93 to -58. I haven't had much of a chance to test against noise or low signal areas to see if it works any better, but it seems to work at least as well as the SR9 so far.

Joe

Ok, I have had a chance to do some long range, NLOS testing and I have much better results to share with everyone about the SR9 vs XR9 questions.

First, this is my setup:
AP: 150 foot tower on a decent size hill.
SR9 is at 150 feet, 10' LRM400 into a 9dbi pac wireless yagi. Noise floor is -95 @ 907 MHz B mode.
XR9 is at 50 feet, 10' LRM240 into a 9dbi pac wireless yagi. Noise floor is -93 @ 907 MHz B mode.

So the first thing to notice is that despite being 100' lower than the SR9 and using lower grade LMR, the XR9 has 2 db worse noise floor.

The client is about 11 miles away. The path includes some lakes, and a mixture of leafy and pine trees. Testing was done on the rooftop (about 20 feet above ground level but still well below the tree heights) using two 12dbi Rootenna's with RB133C's at 12 volts.

The SR9 client had a signal of around -88 and a noise floor around -95. Throughput was an average of 200 kilobits/sec tcp. I turned on an old 900mhz cordless phone that I use for checking interference and the noise floor flew up to -75 and it somehow kept the link active (although throughput was pretty unusable.)

The XR9 client had a signal of around -84 (remember that this AP is 100' lower on the tower) and the noise floor was around -94. So it had better signal than the SR9 at the top of the tower... strange. Anyway, throughput was around 1400k/sec tcp. I misaligned the antenna a bit so I could get the exact same signal readings I had with the SR9. Once I had it bouncing between -88 and -89 signal, I tested throughput again and got around 600k/sec tcp. So the throughput was much better and would be the difference between being able to offer our standard 512k plan and saying "sorry, we can't reach you at this time"... (and yes, I know that it leaves no fade margin, but it is just for example). Anyway, I tested with the cordless phone again, and the noise floor went up 3 db to -91 and throughput hardly changed with the phone on. Amazing!

I did test the XR9 a little more in 5 mhz g-mode, and despite the signal going up about 6db, the throughput went down and the stability was lower too. I regret that I didn't do the noise floor test in this mode, but at this point, it was pretty dark and cold so I decided to call it a night.

So in the end, I am fairly satisfied with the results. If you're planning on swapping out your SR9's for XR9's, don't expect to double your coverage. It's not the "miracle card" that the marketing people at UBNT make it out to be, but it definitely gave me a solid improvement, especially for the customers in fringe areas. And regarding better signal levels, the XR9 seems to perform exactly as well as the SR9 when the signal was around -80 or better, so you won't see any better results there, but giving the fact that the interference didn't affect it as much, it could still make good links better!

If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them or try some additional testing.

Joe

Your post with actual testing results is very well appreciated. Apart from my SR9 infrastructures up north in the mountains which will stay on SR9's, I plan on rolling out a free high speed service in my metropolitan area and since metro area is bound to have more interference, your results in regards to this matter give me more confidence in wanting to try out XR9's in this environment.. Thx man..

Ok, I have had a chance to do some long range, NLOS testing and I have much better results to share with everyone about the SR9 vs XR9 questions.

First, this is my setup:
AP: 150 foot tower on a decent size hill.
SR9 is at 150 feet, 10' LRM400 into a 9dbi pac wireless yagi. Noise floor is -95 @ 907 MHz B mode.
XR9 is at 50 feet, 10' LRM240 into a 9dbi pac wireless yagi. Noise floor is -93 @ 907 MHz B mode.

Thanks for the test results!!

What firmware rev of RouterOS were you running?

George

I have deployed my first 2 xr9 cards and am very encouraged by the initial results. The signal levels seem to be more stable and the throughput a little better that the SR9. The only changes to these units were the xr9 and the mmcx pigtail. The antennas and jumpers and RB were the same. I am running 2.9.35 on the RB112 clients and 2.9.38 on the RB133 AP. I am going to try a long range test on a new business customer that is also a residential customer. I will report back with any findings.

Thanks for the test results!!

What firmware rev of RouterOS were you running?

George

The APs were using 2.9.45. I don't remember what the clients were using. It was either the default 2.9.38 that shipped on them or it would have been the same as the APs if I had upgraded. Either way, I know both the clients were the same. If I get a chance to check, I'll let you know.