Hi Guys, I am looking at installing horns with an A5C, what I want to do is setup one A5C with 2 40degree horns in a 90 degree setup. What is the do and dont on setting them up this way?
The reason for the horns is another wisp has plastered antennas on the same elevator and not much free spectrum is available.
TYIA
Craig
Firstly, Horns have a very short cut off at their edges, you might be able to align them so you can get a total of 90 degrees out of them, but I would expect a dark zone right down the middle unless you overlap them. If you do overlap them, you will not be able to get a full 90 degrees out of the sector.
After that though, it’s pretty straight forward. I would hook up chains 1 & 2 to the first antenna and chains 3 & 4 to the second. The A5c is smart enough to handle the rest. Personally I would use two 50 degree sectors if I didn’t need to shoot over long distances. I would overlap the two sectors by a few degrees to make sure I wouldn’t get a weird dead spot in the middle.
@William5 As always thank you for your response, At the moment I am using the asymmetrical 90 with a Ubiquiti prism and WOW what a difference in signal and speed from a litebeam AP with the same 16db. As I have been testing the 90 I am able to hook up clients over the 90 with it so thats why I was looking at using 2 symmetrical 40’s thinking the edges will go a little further and allow me to get 90 out of the 2 and still have 16db. The farthest I will go out with this link will be 4 to 5 miles so maybe the 2 50’s will do?
Glad to be of help.
Are you planning on using RF Elements? (I have been really happy with them so far.) (Though have not gotten the opportunity to use them with Mimosa Equipment.
Looking at the 40 degree beam pattern from RF Elements (the carrier class line) you will loose another 2-3 dB in signal to customers 2-5 degrees outside of the 20 degrees from center-line. Note: the 16.2 dB is only for the area that the pattern hits the 0 loss area. Every degree off center means you are getting less then 16.2 dB. (This is true for all antennas. Just less effecting to other types of antennas because you have sidelobes and long drop off lines where horns are really good at not having those.)
Here are some examples:
At 45 degrees from off center-line the AM-5G20-90 is loosing about 6 dB of the signal strength that you would see from being on the center-line. But that drops off fairly slowly compared to the RF Elements Horn
Using the RF Elements Link Calculator: (https://rfelements.com/calc/ it has gotten pretty good over the last year that I have been playing with it.)
At 4 miles the 40 degree horn will give you a -63 dB signal (if you are using a 24 dB antenna on your CPE) That drops off to -69 if the customer is 20 degrees from center-line and goes even lower very quickly. If you are dealing with noise at all it’s going to get pretty difficult quickly. Now all that said, you would get a bonus 3 dB using the A5c because of 4 chain MIMO wherever the signals overlapped, so that will help your MCS out a bit. But you will still need pretty big antennas on your CPE to keep up good signals.
Unfortunatly, RF Elements hasn’t released a 40 degree Asymmetrical sector yet and all of their Asymmetrical sectors are only Twist Ports for now. That said, I have been killing it with these new sectors and I would be tempted to deal with adapter cables and using a Twist Port to SMA deal to be able to use 2 60 degree sectors that would give you 17 dB to work with… The A5c gets overlap benefits as well.
@William5 I have used the link calculator and when I use the 50 and the customer that is out 4 miles it shows the signal would be 65 with the rf 400 dish so I could bump that up to the 500 and get the signal needed. The noise will be at the AP as other aps and backhaul are very close. I was also thinking about the 60 asymmetrical because I will have to deal with cables both ways. I see we can buy the cables needed for the twist port and will not have to deal with adapters.
Hot diggity dog. Well good luck!
Take some before and after shots of your Noise and throughput! It will be fun to watch the changes.
@William5 on setting up the horn do you think I should stack them on top of each other or side by side? If side by side should I angle them out or in? Right now I have them set side by side with them angled out. I have not deployed these yet and hope to this weekend or next but wanted more input.
So far we have always stacked our horns one ontop of the other. I have not thought about crossing them, everyone who I’ve seen has always turned them out.
I wouldn’t think crossing them would give you any benefit over turning them out, unless you have a really large (greater then 10 ft) spacing and only in some special cases. But I will have to ponder it a bit.
