Hi,

Im wondering, can this adapter achieve full traffic with 4 G MiniPCI cards plugged in?? Is adapter affecting the traffic that comes through it??

Hi,

Im wondering, can this adapter achieve full traffic with 4 G MiniPCI cards plugged in?? Is adapter affecting the traffic that comes through it??

that is if you can get 4 cards working on the adapter. I owm myself a couple and am aware of half a douzen others who use them and so far no one has managed to get 4 cards working. Some even have problems even getting three of them to work

Hi there

We've used this solution to demonstrate 5 radio cards running simultaneously in one system, with 200Mbps of bridged wireless<>ethernet test traffic split between the 5 cards. There's a description on our website http://www.cablefreesolutions.com FWIW.

It was necessary to disable a lot of other peripherals in the BIOS, and restrict use of some IRQs - the auto mode came up with some IRQ combinations that don't work.

In summary, depends on what motherboard you are using, and some tricky BIOS setup required - but it can be done.

Regards

I'm using a routerboard 532 solution with four card wireless installed.
At this moment I'm having issue with sporadics high ping with a card.
Since two of the four cards are using the same IRQ, is it possible that it is the root cause?

best regards
Massimo

I can't answer your question definitively, but can say in our test (200Mbps aggregate on 5 wireless cards) IRQs were shared, and still this performance was achieved.
The performance of PCI bus is greater than 100MHz and capable of ~1Gbps throughput: your ping variations are in milliseconds?
More likely to be an "airside" (interference)?

Do note the risk of "self-interference" if any of the cards are on adjacent frequencies: a big "don't" for doing that.
It also matters "which card", some are more prone to interference as the filters on CM9s and clones are worse than later R52 and clone chipsets, which have better filters.

Good luck-

Do note the risk of "self-interference" if any of the cards are on adjacent frequencies: a big "don't" for doing that.
It also matters "which card", some are more prone to interference as the filters on CM9s and clones are worse than later R52 and clone chipsets, which have better filters.

Good luck-

Dear Patrick,

Are you saying that, bandpass filter
for out of band noise for AR-5006X is better than AR-5004X ?

Thx
//budi

That's what people are saying.
I don't have a detailed CM9-R52 comparison for this myself.
However we have done "antenna co-location" tests using R52 and you can amazingly close for adjacent channels, much better than expected.

Having "received power levels similar" is one of the vital tricks: if you can arrange for the signals arriving to have similar levels, you don't have the problem of the strong ones drowning the weak ones.
Choose suitable antennas, and if necessary, tweak them to get the signal levels arriving similar.
That works well when terminating multiple P2P links on one mast (we have about 10 in one customer network, all in 5GHz spectrum, 20MHz channels, all on one mast, no interference) but is harder to arrange in sectored P2MP.

Anyone with detailed CM9 - R52 comparison, do post -

Regards

We use the PCI to MiniPCI 4 slot adapters all the time. One thing you have to watch out for though is how many watts of power do your mini cards use...
A PCI bus only has 25 watts to go around for everything using it.
The ubiquiti SR2 and SR5 cards use about 5 watts each.
After i had problems with 4 cards in the adapter i determined it was an issue with it not getting enough power, and modified my 4 slot adapter to hook directly up to the 3.3v lead off of the power supply.
After the modification all my problems went away.

We use the PCI to MiniPCI 4 slot adapters all the time. One thing you have to watch out for though is how many watts of power do your mini cards use...
A PCI bus only has 25 watts to go around for everything using it.
The ubiquiti SR2 and SR5 cards use about 5 watts each.
After i had problems with 4 cards in the adapter i determined it was an issue with it not getting enough power, and modified my 4 slot adapter to hook directly up to the 3.3v lead off of the power supply.
After the modification all my problems went away.

I'll just add - Use good PSUs. 300-350 W are enough for our work, but PSUs like JNC, qTek and other brands, are giving false information about true Watts of their PSUs, they can reach the max Watts only on peaks and for short time, they don't filter very good the voltages and you have 12v line going crazy from 11v to 13v and etc. Use only good brands like Fortron (which I prefer right next to ISO, they have best Perf/Price), Enermax (which is something like Rolls Roys for the PSUs), Antec, Matrix and etc, Active or Pacive PFC models. Sometimes good UPS, doesn't solve your bad PSU model. You will safe 10-20 $ from the PSU if you use cheap one, but you can have a lot of problems with it.

And the other thing you should watch is the IRQs, just don't mess different Chipsets in one adapter ! Using only one card is preferable (I connect 2 5004x and 1 5006x (my mistake) and the machine strart rebooting ...).

The 3rd thing you should watch is the interference problems. Try different freqs and try to issolate the cards (Without getting short your circuit board !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) .

I always use quality power supplies for those systems, because i know the 3.3v off the power supply probably isn't regulated as good as the one on the motherboard.
What would you recommend for sheilding on my cards? It is a good idea but i do not have any sheilding in place on my current rigs.
Ive never tried putting different chipsets in the same adapter, so thanks for the heads up!

I'll just add - Use good PSUs. 300-350 W are enough for our work, but PSUs like JNC, qTek and other brands, are giving false information about true Watts of their PSUs, they can reach the max Watts only on peaks and for short time, they don't filter very good the voltages and you have 12v line going crazy from 11v to 13v and etc. Use only good brands like Fortron (which I prefer right next to ISO, they have best Perf/Price), Enermax (which is something like Rolls Roys for the PSUs), Antec, Matrix and etc, Active or Pacive PFC models.

Are you using Routerboard solution?
I have not found embedded pc with 4 miniPCI slot.
could you help me to find the motherboard with 4 minipci adapter alternative to Routerboard?