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Need sugestions for a 5.8Ghz STL link

R

rew

It looks like I will be needing to put up a 2 hop 5.8Ghz link to use as a STL. The first hop will be the studio to a tower about 3 miles away. The second hop will be from this tower to our transmitter site, about a 12 mile hop.
I am looking for suggestions on the equipment to use, Radios as well as the encoders and decoders.
This is the first link of this type I have done so I look for any suggestions you may have.

Thanks,
Robert
 
I would look into Motorola PTP or Proxim Tsunami bridges and APT codecs (Horizon/Horizon NextGen or Astral)


Regards,
Goran Tomas
 
If you have a tight budget, I've heard several people speak highly of the EnGenius outdoor access points. I've heard of single hops running in excess of 30 miles with a clean line of sight. One guy I know has put them up all over his town and is running main programming and backhaul audio on them as if they were all local networked audio. Generally, there's no need to encode/decode because he's just transporting raw digital information since the transmitter is now on the same net as the studio. These things network all of his transmitter sites to the studios with no lossy compression involved. It's pretty amazing.

I think he's using the EnGenius EOC5611P for most of the work. They have something like 23dBi antennas that are built-in so there's a tight little beam with about 45 db of gain when two of the APs are talking to each other.
 
Correction, the internal antennas are 14dbi, so he gets 28dBi out of a pair. I think I have seen some with higher gains, though.
 
Kmagrill said:
I think he's using the EnGenius EOC5611P for most of the work. They have something like 23dBi antennas that are built-in so there's a tight little beam with about 45 db of gain when two of the APs are talking to each other.
Click to expand...

At one of the stations i help out at we are using a similar set of units by demarctech. We were not allowed to put up an stl tower due to nimby folks so we have a two hop system. Station -->(1 air mile LOS) to towns Water Tank-->(3 air miles LOS)To Our TX Tower. Been in use about 3 years without a lick of down time, and the system at the water tower is solar powered with up to 80 hours of backup power. This was originally set to be a temporary solution but has worked out so well that its been used permanently.
 
check out the Ubiquiti products Nanopower bridge and others.Plenty of players here from 100.00 to 10K andd freq ranges 2.4,3.65(licensed) 5.8,and 900 series..You need to know what freqs are being used around you.It's getting crowded in some areas.Might explore the 3.65.LOS important..These units can do fine even it near tree tops when the weather is great,but let some wind and rain come around,those wet leaves and wind will be a problem..Make sure you use FTP cat cable..Ubiquiti has their new tough cable and connectors we are using now...
 
I have a station on the coast and have used the Ubiquity Rocket M5 radios on a 10 mile path at 5.8 ghz with a 5G30 antenna on both ends for about a year now. Bought them on E-Bay for around $450.00 for the pair with radios. I have nothing but good things to say about it. We went through one of the worst winter storms and had a lot of snow over the winter, never dropped at all. The speed is better than the DSL we have connected, and have used it as an STL several times when we had a failures with other methods. Ubiquiti is #1 in my book. Easy to set up(has LED's for signal str on the radios for aming the dish)! And works like a champ. ED
 
Another vote for Ubiquiti. I'm not using it as an STL, but I have a 13.5 mile hop going with two Nanobridge M5s. Rock solid since last fall.
 
Here another vote for Ubiquiti.

Try the nanobridges. These are accesspoint/client devices in a dish!
Power over ethernet and rockstable for outdoor devices. we have 6 devices running here since december without any reboot/stability issues or errors.
No RF cables, just ethernet to the tower ( please ground it well!! ).

They rock for that price, really!
 
fugazi said:
Here another vote for Ubiquiti.

Try the nanobridges. These are accesspoint/client devices in a dish!
Power over ethernet and rockstable for outdoor devices. we have 6 devices running here since december without any reboot/stability issues or errors.
No RF cables, just ethernet to the tower ( please ground it well!! ).

They rock for that price, really!
Click to expand...

On our system we use polyphaser etherenet surge protectors with good results, and as i said 3 years of uptime, in a lightning prone area.
 
Thanks everyone for the information. This gives me a lot of choices to look over. The Towerstream looked good but I am not near any of there service areas.

Thanks Again
Robert
 
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