Hi All

I'm planning on setting up a new base station and need to decide on which router board to use. The site will start with 3 AP sectors and 2 grids for back haul. I've previously made use of R433(AH)'s, mostly running 2 x RB433(AH)'s with dual XR5 in them. What makes the RB600 attractive is it's capacity to house multiple wireless cards. One can easily get 4 x XR5's fitted with the daughter board, obviously with good power supply (planning on running a 24V system from a 15A Steca Solsum solar regulator).

I've read a lot of posts about random reboots on the RB600's? I'd appreciate it if you guys can give some feedback on personal experiences. This specific base station is very remote and it will be a nightmare if it's going to be unstable. I've also read about very happy customers, I specifically remember comments from "Tanker".

The other question I have is with fitting 4 wireless cards within one enclosure. Currently I have no problems with 2 x XR5's in my RB433's, but I've read some posts where they recommend only using 1 wireless card per router board, to prevent interference?! Is this not a bit overkill? Why then make router boards that can house more than one wireless card? The RB600 can house up to 8 cards.

I'd appreciate any advice.

Thanks

You read different ideas about wireless and interferences because everyone has his own experience..

IMHO, using only one RB600 to serve everything isn't a good deal...
If the RB goes down (failure, maintenance) the whole site goes down... Having multiple boards permits a redundancy if 2 radios have the same direction (for load balancing too).
XR5... Fantastic radio but coupled with another XR5 gives me a lot of troubles in a PtMP envirorment. If i turn off one of them the other one works perfectly.
Once again, this is my own experience; i read people using successfully 8 radios in one enclosure... I have issues with 4 radios.
From now on i'll go for 2 SR5 or R5H for each board..

If money was no problem, I would have probably settled for individual 411AH's, but at the moment I have to budget a bit. I think I'm going to give the RB600's a go. One handling the 3 sectors (3 XR5's) and on handling the back haul (2 XR5's).

At a later stage I can maybe get a dual system going on the AP side, that is an exact copy of the current system. When the primary system fail, I'll remotely activate the backup system. Thus, 2 x RB600 with 6 sectors... where the backup system is switched off until the primary system fails.

As the previous poster mentioned, there are a lot of variable and personal experience.

My experience has been that the XR5s are worse than SRs. We have retrofitted numerous links installed with XRs to SRs and have had no issues with them afterwards. There is another topic running regarding CTS that may benefit you if running more than 1 XR5 on a board.

We have several 600s up with a mixture of SR5s and CM9s all in 5ghz and at my last look, they had all been up for more than 9 months (on 3.11).

Hi, I have RB600 and RB600A in many places and the performance and stability is excellent. With 3.28 and wireless-test all work perfect.

Regards!

Thanks for all the feedback. I've settled on the RB600 with a maximum of 4 x XR5s in each. I'll keep you posted on how it worked out.

Another positive post for the 600's here. The only problem I've had is they are not immune to lightning. Not even a little bit. One little strike... its just 100,000 volts...