Yesterday I went to the site on a mountain where I am trying to distribute internet. I had lot of works there so I went early than usual. I had a good reliable wireless point to point link between the tower in the office to the site with two Power Beam 5AC from Ubiquiti. However, the site Power Beam got permanently damaged due to failure of the transformer in the village. I heard, yesterday that other ISP equipment were also damaged. After that few days ago, I had installed Lite Beam to replace the damaged site power beam antenna. On that day, I just could not connect the Lite Beam to the Power Beam on the office tower. I could not find the SSID transmitted by the Power Beam AP(Access Point). I had only an one hour or so before getting dark and so could not work and returned back home.
Yesterday, it was around 11:20 pm when I left the city. It takes around 40 mins to reach the site on the mountain. The straight distance light of sight between the tower in the city to the site on the mountain is 7.2 km(shown by the Ubiquiti radio user interface). But the road is longer with lots of turns to reach the site. Having reached early I could do more work and successfully was able to connect the Lite Beam configured as station to the Power Beam in the office tower.
See the Ubqiuiti and TP-Link radio installation in the video below:
At first I tried from the same site location where I used to install power beam and now lite beam. I fixed the Lite Beam more firmly and checked the direction to the tower on the office building. I also installed CPE510 to link to another CPE510 installed on the office tower. I had pre-configured both the CPE510 radios with SSID and password. So I had made two point to point links 1) with power beam and lite beam and 2)two CPE510. There are couple of reasons for doing this. I could not rely on the power beam to lite beam because I had not been able to connect them few days ago and I also had bad experience with connecting two Ubiquiti Lite AP with distance of 300m which I also wrote about in Struggles with Ubiquiti Lite AP and PowerBeam Connections. I also wrote a small note on comparison between TP-Link and Ubiquiti radios.
After physical installation, I check whether I could connect them to the APs on the tower. With Lite Beam I had no luck. I could not find the SSID during the scanning. With CPE510, I was able to connect with only few mega bits per second data rate. I saw 15Mbps download and 6Mbps upload but there was no internet signal. Then I thought that it could be line of sight problem or rather the frezel zone problem. So I decided to check the antenna from another site which has clear line of sight to the office tower without any doubts. I dismantled the CPE510 and the Lite Beam and took to the other site. From there with Lite Beam I was able to immediately connect to the Power Beam AP on the tower. I was happy to see that. That meant that there was no problem with Lite Beam radio antenna. The people in the village knew about what I was doing and where I had installed the antenna previously. So they asked me whether I was able to get internet and I answered yes. I also tried with CPE510 and Lite AP also and I was able to scan and find the SSID but just could not connect to the internet. It was already starting to get dark in the evening so I decided to stop the work. I had also to walk because the road was being built.
Today, perhaps I will go there and try also to connect the CPE510 and the LiteAP to the power beam in my office building tower. CPE510 is rated for 15 km and my point to point distance is 7.1 km which is also shown in the CPE510 user interface.
