Wood Scraps Pay Off at Work

glenn bradley

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With additional delays in some cross-town fiber-optic installation, we are mounting some 1 Gbps radios to reach a site while waiting on the 10 Gbps media to be available. I cobbled together the MDF "Alignment Assistance Devices" you see hanging on the front of the receive dish in the first pic from some scraps. This was a big improvement on holding a pizza box against the front of the unit as we have in the past :rofl:. This unit is actually on the roof of my building. The other end of the first hop is a bit over a mile away on the 70 foot tower circled in red in the second pic. I then launch off the other side of the tower and shoot down into the Riverside valley area. I will leave these four units in place as a failover path once the dedicated path is in place.

Align-o-matic-1.JPG . Align-o-matic-2.jpg

I've gotta tell you, it was all I could do to not cut this thing out to look like a nose and a mustache :D. The MDF piece is removed after rough alignment. We have "real" tools to dial the radios in for real.
 
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Wow Glenn u sure get up to some great techie projects.

Pretty neat idea for scrap use.

Just because you aroused the curiosity is there any analog output from these units that can be examined on a scope screen for a peak alignment with a carrier running?

I know zip about the units just wondering about how resilient the link is once established if it happens to be on one or other edge of the signal.
Thinking in terms of wind shaking the mount either side. I dunno i guess i am still a relic of analog times. lol.



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Just because you aroused the curiosity is there any analog output from these units that can be examined on a scope screen for a peak alignment with a carrier running?

Something like that but, we haven't used analog scopes in the field for quite some time. The signal is presented in a nice looking GUI format that is more than adequate to confirm bit rates between hops but, is woefully inadequate for any testing one might do at the bench. There is a special output for that but, you have to be physically attached to the interface. Since you can only turn the levels on these little guys down enough to function at a minimum of 100 meters, there isn't a lot of two way testing you can accomplish at the bench. You take your individual readings, establish your planned settings and then take them out where you can get away from each other to line them up.

These units are surprisingly resilient. We actually set a pair up across a 1 kilometer span of the campus by eye and got around 800 Mbps each way out of them. They maintained that operation well even though they were held in place with a bit of bailing wire and duct tape. With a little care and feeding they will exceed a gig each way to allow for overhead (AES encryption and some housekeeping) while still providing a good data path. The roof mounts are ballast weighted with cinder blocks (super hi-tech :p) but, even so the tripods are rated at 100 mph winds against the silhouette of this particular radio housing.

Being in So Cal I cannot testify to the precipitation claims but, unless you're in the-Ever-Grey-state, the throughput loss is pretty minimal even where they do have weather. Air moisture content is the issue so whether rain, snow or fog, it is air moisture density, not visual impurity that comes into play.

Climbing the towers is not my normal thing but, I assign myself to some things just because they're fun :thumb:. I'll add some pics from the hilltop and the eventual destination site once we get there.
 
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