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millenium7
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Cube 60Pro - Real world range/reliability/alignment

Thu Jun 30, 2022 5:02 am

Having (mostly) mastered the fine art of the LHG60G, I feel I now need to figure out the Cube60Pro's since MikroTik has very lacklustre documentation on actual real world usability

First and foremost what are people actually managing to achieve with their point-to-point setups? At the moment we have a single link up that is doing 1.35km on 60ghz (have 5ghz completely disabled for now) and has survived light rain. So far that's quite good and at least matches the LHG60G dish. Waiting on some heavy rain (which the LHG60G will then drop) to assess how it actually performs
However the 5ghz signal and performance is utterly terrible, to the point its not even really usable for anything other than management traffic and perhaps VoIP. Signal is -71db, single chain only and it'll be lucky to push 50mbit/s with quite a bit of latency variation and almost no interference. Was hoping for dual chain and 10db better signal to achieve useable performance. It's almost not even worth including, i'd rather pay more for something that actually is viable to tide over customers for an hour of rainfall, or pay less and not even have it.

Alignment is much like the other 60ghz products. Very good to achieve and maintain a link even way out of alignment
However pretty hopeless at precise alignment. The included suggestions of up/down/left/right are useless - as was the case with previous 60ghz products - as they are just flat out wrong until you get extremely close to center and are at least 500m apart. MikroTik REALLY should document the phase array patterns and numbers in the wiki, and they should absolutely change its behaviour in alignment mode to only utilize phase shifting to keep the link up, but all beaconing to determine alignment and RSSI needs to be done solely when its shooting forward. As RSSI values are completely wrong and misleading when the other side is phase shifting to the sides

Speaking of which.... what is the center sector for these radio's? This is vital to correct alignment, as we found the only reliable way to get a stable 60ghz link is to lock to TX-Sector 36, run UDP traffic flat out and look at error rate's first and RSSI second. Then we can achieve pretty impressive performance, otherwise if leaving on auto, forget it you're basically guaranteed a dead connection in even light rain
We could not get these precisely aligned and saying 'center' as I had no idea what sector is considered center to get it there

I intend to push them further and see exactly how far they can go in heavy rain without dropping, however with such poor 5ghz performance they are a paperweight if they lose the 60ghz link. Unless they offer better reliability or better range, there's no incentive to using them over the LHG60 dish
 
GuntOn
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Re: Cube 60Pro - Real world range/reliability/alignment

Fri Jul 15, 2022 11:28 am


We could not get these precisely aligned and saying 'center' as I had no idea what sector is considered center to get it there
I am also very interested in this
 
thryve
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Re: Cube 60Pro - Real world range/reliability/alignment

Thu Sep 15, 2022 2:41 pm

Hi millenium7
Thanks for sharing.
Would you let us know what reception level you get on the 1.35km link?.
I'm about to buy some testing units but it is really hard to find anything about real performance for these little cube pro.

Best regards

Dimas
 
Ivoshiee
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Re: Cube 60Pro - Real world range/reliability/alignment

Sat Sep 17, 2022 4:18 pm

I finally managed to order a pair of that devices, but I haven't received it yet. The noted poor 5GHz is somewhat alarming, because that is the only reason of ordering one instead of current 1.5km LHG60G link in place. Is it even comparable to a regular Cube60ac performance?
 
millenium7
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Re: Cube 60Pro - Real world range/reliability/alignment

Sun Sep 18, 2022 5:10 am

We've put a few up
The longest is still 1.35km and I've noticed it has dropped out more frequently in moderate to heavy rain, presumably it's moved a tiny fraction but whatever the case it's a 'real world' deployment, with real equipment in real conditions. If it's slipped by 1 degree and that causes an issue then that's what you're realistically going to have to expect. I haven't looked closely at how long it goes down for but I do know the link does come back fairly quickly - seconds to minutes despite it still raining
Not a solution for critical uplink that needs real time traffic. You do want to pair it with a dedicated backup. But in clear conditions or light rain it's fantastic


Have a few more sub 1km and I don't believe any have dropped up to that range. I do like them, but they're also pointless for their intended use of having 5ghz backup. Just forget it. The only 'real world' use case for that 5ghz radio ive found is
1) Management data backup, I tried ROS7.5 and it completely screwed up the 60ghz connectivity, just kept dropping right after connecting. I used the 5ghz link to log in and downgrade firmware to restore connectivity
2) At short ranges like 200 metres AND where it's clear of interference then you can get just usable performance out of 40mhz or 80mhz channel. The thing is at this range 60ghz will never drop unless someone walks directly in front of the radio and blocks it. So perhaps if it was low on a rooftop with workers that semi regularly go by it could have some tangible benefit. This is a pretty slim use case.......

Overall I like the radios but they're pretty much on par with a LHG60G in a much more compact form (though harder to align at distance and less stable mount). And it can go 1 channel higher
Don't buy it because it has 5ghz
Good radio, but also completely misses it's intended purpose
It would be SO MUCH BETTER if it didnt have 5ghz at all but had a PoE-out port to power a dedicated 5ghz radio for failover
 
millenium7
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Re: Cube 60Pro - Real world range/reliability/alignment

Sun Sep 18, 2022 5:20 am

Also I believe the centre sector pattern is the same as LHG60G with an 8x8 array
27,28
35,36
Are the 4 centre sector numbers.... But id like a mikrotik rep to confirm it is indeed the case
All our links tend to favor sector 35 when aligned as best as possible. The beamforming appears to be more stable and doesn't flap around between sector numbers anywhere near as much as the LHG60G radios
 
prague
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Re: Cube 60Pro - Real world range/reliability/alignment

Tue Sep 12, 2023 12:45 am

why is there such big latency on PTMP setup ? anyone has a knowledge ?
 
DenisPDA
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Re: Cube 60Pro - Real world range/reliability/alignment

Wed Sep 13, 2023 2:12 pm

why is there such big latency on PTMP setup ? anyone has a knowledge ?
Hi
Try turning w60g interface off and on (ap bridge)

For example
/interface/w60g/disable wlan60-1
delay 8
/interface/w60g/enable wlan60-1
 
prague
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Re: Cube 60Pro - Real world range/reliability/alignment

Wed Sep 13, 2023 9:09 pm

delay between the mentioned AP and CPE is very high
why is there such big latency on PTMP setup ? anyone has a knowledge ?
Hi
Try turning w60g interface off and on (ap bridge)

For example
/interface/w60g/disable wlan60-1
delay 8
/interface/w60g/enable wlan60-1

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