Channel tuning tips and tricks

Products A5
#1

We are in rural area in the Midwest of USA with not a lot of noise and we’re trying to tune our network to get max signals/throughput. Does anyone have any tips or tricks to reading the spectrum analyzer and making sense of the CDF vertical axis?

We attempted to switch to SRS to improve performance but that made things worse. We are now back in Interop and would like to get the most out of it before trying SRS and AGC.

Rough topology:
3 Towers
Tower 1: One backhaul (B5) to Tower 2
Tower 1: One backhual (B5 lite) to Tower 3
Tower 2: 3 A5c KP Performance Sectors
Tower 3: 1 A5c KP Performance Sector and 1 N5-360 Omni

2nd Question:
Is it possible for us to open up UNII-2 bands for our WISP?

Thanks for any input!

#2

As far as your questions go, maybe I am a little unclear.

So, the CDF vertical axis on the Spectrum Analyzer shows how often and the strength of noise that occurs on a particular frequency.

As you go higher on the graph, you have stronger noise, depending on how frequently the noise occurs it will be a different color. Where I marked with green lines is very infrequent noise, Where I marked with the black arrow is noise that is always present (for my area it’s the background noise)

Think of the color scale as being upside down, going from 1 to 100%. Purple being near one and red being 100% of the time noise at that level is measured as being present.

image
image1455×266 35 KB

In regards to your second question, do you mean UNII-2a or UNII-2b? 2a should already be available to you, 2b is off limits for everyone in the United States.

#3

Thanks for the quick response. That helps.

I have another question. Would you recommend getting wireless channels tuned in Wifi-Interop and then convert to SRS? Also, when do you think one should switch to or use SRS? Should it only be used in high noise environments or by default on every network? What are your thoughts?

Thanks again for your help.

#4

I would read this page and all that it links too very carefully and understand what will be happening before going to SRS from WiFi Interop.
http://ap.help.mimosa.co/srs-overview
Particularly this page: http://ap.help.mimosa.co/srs-switching-from-wifi-interop-to-srs
These are the resources that were available to me 2 years ago when I stopped using my last WiFi Interop Sector and everything switched over just fine for me. From the looks of them the resources have only gotten better. Follow them closely and you should be fine.

As far as Should and When to use SRS, I use SRS all the time by default. I don’t see many reasons not to use it, but that is mostly because I did this bad idea on my first Mimosa Tower and not using it killed my throughput.:

So I use SRS all the time. That said, I have seen some people on the forums posting some pretty darn cool numbers with WiFi Interop and wide channels. So it’s kinda up to you and your situation. I think one of the links I posted previously will take you to a protocol comparison. I guess my rule of thumb would be, if you need more spectrum or you can’t properly space your APs then it probably would be best if you used SRS. If you are not dealing with lots of noise and have very little to no self interference issues you can run Interop and probably not have issues.

#5

Several things you can do:

  1. Ditch the B5 / B5lite, use another spectrum for your backhaul and re-use the valuable 5GHz spectrum for your access points.
  2. If tower 2 &3 can see each other LOS then definitely switch on SRS so that you can re-used that spectrum.
  3. Use narrower antennas and maybe horns to cut the interference.