Re: Ubiquity wifi access point

We also have "bucket routers" (i.e., routers under buckets) scattered all over these mountains, which seem to last longer than the cables do (the animals chew them, for example, or trees fall, particularly Bay and Monterey Pine, which are weak trees overall.

While nothing is simpler than running a cable from Rod Speed's router to his neighbor's router, I think Rod said his neighbor doesn't have a router.

So you still need an approximately $100 USD investment in "something".

Given Internet in the USA is roughly between $50 and $100 USD a month, it's one month's investment in a Ubuquiti radio (give or take), which seems worth it. With that one investment, Rod can paint the neighbor's house with adequate signal that all the Android devices will likely read as pretty good.

Given the iDevices and computers may still have issues receiving signal, it's "only" another month's investment in two radios, but, then you also need another month's investment in a router at the end of that second radio.

IMHO, Rod should plan on one radio with good antenna specs (which basically necessitates a dish or sector, doesn't it Jeff?) and sensitivity (they're all pretty good on the sensitivity spec, I think).

If that one radio doesn't work for all devices in the neighbor's home, then Rod doesn't have to rip out the first radio - he just adds the second radio on the side of the neighbor's house - and - a WiFi router, and the second home is all set.

Dunno if it will matter, but there's a 5-foot high chainlink fence, isn't there?

Jeff - would that matter?

As Jeff is well aware, the "strangest things" will block signal, where Jeff is talking about the bricks above, and where Jeff mentioned the window glass out here is basically a brick wall to radio waves (in my very humble but very direct and irrefutable experience).

Another thing that has accidentally killed my signal has been a large mirror where I couldn't get much signal into a room where signal was everywhere else as measured nicely by my Android phone utilities.

Turned out the mirror was most of the culprit (maybe pipes too) in a large bathroom between my access point and the bedroom where I was trying to get iDevices to be happy.

So note to Rod - check out where the neighbor hangs largish mirrors in the direction between your house and theirs.

Where? I don't see a chain link fence in the photo:

Yes. Neither 2.4 or 5Ghz will go through a chain link fence.

misc.phone.mobile.iphone deleted from the distribution because there is nothing in this thread that has anything to do with iPhones. Never mind that I don't like Apple, iPhones, etc.

Yep. If he runs a cable or fiber between houses, I would install a wireless router setup as an AP (access point). That means the WAN (internet) port is not used and the DHCP server is disabled. The cable or fiber from Rod's router goes to one of the LAN ports.

However, there's one stupid problem with this derangement. When anyting goes wrong, someone invariably punches the reset button, causing everything to return to the defaults. That enables the DHCP server. Having two DHCP servers on the same LAN will create some rather strange connectivity symptoms. After a few too many late night service calls to fix a reset problem, I've resorted to using a real access point. Netgear WAC104: I've only installed one of these so far. No problems with throughput, better range than the Linksys it replaced, QoS works, 4 LAN ports, and no reset problems. However, the antennas are not removable, IPv4 only, the configuration a bit complicated, and a bit pricey at about $60. Too soon to tell if it's a winner.

Nope, sheet metal fence. You can see it on the far right of the photo.

Cant see it, an AP at roof level where the photo was taken would be looking down on its top edge like the camera does.

I had responded from Rod Speed's words, but I didn't notice a photo embedded in his post. When you mentioned a photo, I was, like, how did you get a photo? Then I looked back into the thread to see Rod had kindly posted -1000 words.

Rod subsequently has clarified: "sheet metal fence. You can see it on the far right of the photo."

Rod: You have to let Jeff know the relationship of that sheet-metal fence to the position of the radio beam, because I don't know how it will affect the signal if it's in the primary or secondary Fresnel Zone.

How about a solid sheet metal fence then! :)

NOTE: I can see now this is like diagnosing a medical issue over the phone, or more like engineering a solution over the net! :)

It should work ... but ...

I did. I am proposing to put the AP where the photo was taken, but higher than that, about 10' off the ground there.

My current thinking is to get a Ubiquiti UAP-AC-M, or something equivalent if someone suggests something cheaper or better for the same price, put it on the edge of my flat roof where the photo was taken and see how well that works. If it isnt as good as the wifi repeater was, move it to where the wifi repeater is, about half way down that fence, on a pole instead of under a bucket and that should perform as well as the wifi repeater does and wouldn?t need continual power cycling.

If that still doesn?t work for some reason, move it even closer to their house. All that means is some more cat5e and a simple switch should be good enough to provide some protection against a lightning ground strike near there.

The current medion wifi repeater works fine there radio wise.

Oh. OK. Jeff is sincerely trying to help, so please do answer all his questions faithfully. If you're putting the radio ABOVE the metal fence, then that's different, but if the fence is, say, halfway between the radio and the house, then it could easily be in the 12-foot high Fresnel Zone that Jeff previously calculated.

It's OK to be in the primary Fresnel Zone, but it sucks signal. As Jeff noted, painting the house with signal isn't your problem though; your problem is that the signal that comes back out of the house is puny.

It's like a major league baseball pitcher pitching to a grade school catcher, where the catcher can't throw the ball back to the pitcher because the distance to the 90-foot plate is too far for him to throw back.

He can easily receive any pitch the pitcher gives him but he is too puny to send it back.

So I don't know if the metal fence affects the return signal from the devices in the neighbor's house or not. Jeff would know better than I, at least theoretically.

Luckily for you, the setup needs one radio at a minimum, so, you can test it out, and, if it doesn't work for the return throw back of the pitch, you can just buy another radio and then we KNOW it will work (since we habitually connect for miles over line of sight between matching radios).

I'm mostly familiar with Ubiquiti Rockets, Nanobeams/Powerbeams, and Bullets. Jeff is a pro so he'll be more familiar with a wider range.

Looking it up, at $86 USD I'd wonder if you need a better antenna.

I mean, seriously, the advertising for the dish stuff I've been mentioning is in multiple kilometers, while this says "Range of up to 600'".

They all lie, but *for the same price* I'd go with something that I know goes kilometers and that has a 30dBi antenna (e.g., my RocketDish is a

30dBi antenna).

Do you know offhand what that means? I'll tell you.

Without using the word isotropic, it essentially means that whatever signal it sees is "amplified" by a lot. Just 3 decibels is double the power. 10 decibels is 10 times the power. 30 decibels is 10 times 10 times 10 the power, which is that a small signal is "amplified" one thousand times, just by the dumb metal dish alone.

What's the dBi of that Ubiquiti UAP-AC-M access point? I'll bet you'd be lucky to get a 10 dBi omni with that thing.

Remember: You need receiver decibels and receiver sensitivity.

If you buy something that doesn't have receiver decibels and receiver sensitivity, that's fine - but that's what you need (given your constraints).

Does that "thing" have receiver sensitivity and decibels advantages over similarly priced equipment with dish and sector antennas?

Almost certainly not.

Methinks you're going for ease of setup, which is fine, but that's a different constraint than the fact that it has to work once it's set up, particularly for the weak signal that will be coming back from the neighbor's house.

Still ... it says "up to 600 feet", so, that should mean something like "at least 150 feet, shouldn't it?

Well, you "could" put a bucket router next to their bedroom window, and that would work fine too. I'm not joking.

You have something like 300 feet of cable from your router to the bucket router, so you can put a router outside their kitchen window.

In fact, you can put that same router inside their office if it's along the wall facing your house. So, that would work too.

All you'd need is 1 router and 150 feet of slightly buried cable. We use the outdoor stuff that has a ground wire and metal/plastic rj45 connections.

Well, I never used them, but Ubiquiti makes routers too, I think, which, I think, are outdoor rated, so, you could just put a Ubiquiti router outside somewhere unobtrusive halfway between the two homes.

You have lots of options.

My choice? I'd spend less than $100 USD in any case. I'd put a decent radio on my wall. It would likely be a bullet/nanobeam/powerbeam/rocket in that order of costs (where a rocket will cost more than $100 but the rest won't).

You can even go with a 1 watt Bullet with any planar antenna you want (you can mix and match). I have one of those too. It works fine for distances of about 2 miles (to another radio).

I was just reading the advertising blurb for

When the word 'discreetly' struck me as perhaps one of Rod Speed's unspoken requirements.

Rod might not want to be advertising the whole world with an antenna the size of a basketball hoop that he's feeing the neighbor with signal. Out here, where I live, our homes are festooned with antennas, since no wires but electricity and telephone come into our homes (underground, by code).

The advertising blurb for that $100 USD UAP-AC-M says: "The UniFi AC Mesh AP is designed to *discreetly* integrate into any environment."

What's nicer, is that Rod can use it inside his house, which is even more discrete (cover it up with a pillowcase, for example): "The UniFi AC Mesh AP can be used indoors or outdoors. "

And he can mount it basically anywhere: "The UniFi AC Mesh AP can be mounted on a wall, pole"

And, best of all, he can change the antenna gain: "or fast-mount of a Ubiquiti high-gain antenna."

So, if it has "enough" antenna gain, and receiver sensitivity, it should work, but I do that via heuristics while Jeff actually knows what he's doing, so, as always, Jeff's opinion trumps mine.

PS: Rod. Do you need to be "discrete"?

Roy Tremblay wrote

Nar, I don?t really care much about that, particularly when it high enough so that some stupid kid doesn?t choose to try and damage it or it gets damaged accidentally.

The back neighbours do sometimes have visitors into ball games etc.

I don?t really care about that. Most would just assume its some unusual TV antenna or satellite dish etc.

Ours arent exactly festooned, but we don?t have cable TV here, just free to air TV from transmitters a tens of KMs away and most have external antennas for that and quite a few have satellite dishes too.

Yeah, that bit suits me, plan to mount it on the wall or the barge board above that initially and move it to a pole halfway down the back neighours back yard if mounted on my house doesn?t give a good enough result. It must be able to do much better than the medion wifi repeater which doesn?t even have any external antennas so should work fine where it works fine now.

Nope. Would be handy to be reasonably robust so a cricket ball from the back neighours backyard wouldn?t be a problem.

It would be nice to know where the fence is located along the 150ft path length. I realize that it's at an angle, so just give me an approximation of how far from your prospective access point where it crosses the fence. Basically, it has to be some radius from the centerline of the 150ft path at midpoint, and less if the fence is away from the midpoint. You can estimate the numbers (they're not critical) from this graph:

150 ft is 0.046km. Only the 1st Fresnel zone is important.

Oh-oh, I did something wrong. It's not a 12ft radius as I previous claimed. This calculator shows 1.2m clearance (4ft) from the center line. That's more reasonable.

Back to the illumination angle. "Roy Tremblay" mumbled something about difficulty getting a transmit signal from the house and using a higher gain dish antenna. Both are wrong, but I'm not going to burn time and bytes right now doing damage control. I estimated the illumination angle needed to light up the entire house from 150ft at

56 degrees. If you have a protractor, you might want to measure this angle. Basically, whatever contrivance you select, the horizontal beamwidth (radiation angle) cannot be less than this 56 degrees or the end parts of the house will not receive any signal. Actually, it should be more than 56 degrees to deal with alignment errors and because the signal level is already -3dB (half power) at the edges of the illumination angle.

The Ubiquiti Nanobeam and Powerbeam products won't work because with

13 or more dBi of antenna gain, the beamwidth is too narrow. Something like maybe 10 degrees scraped from the graphs. If you use one of those, you'll have great coverage over about a 10 ft wide horizontal piece of the house, and nowhere else. Again, you need 56 degrees or more to cover the entire house.

So, let's try the Ubiquiti NanoStation LocoM2 for about $50. Looking at the graphs on Pg 7, the horizontal beamwidth (at -3dB points) appears to be about 90 degrees. Good enough and we have a candidate. Now for the link budget calcs. See tables on Pg 6 and 7. Since your neighbor is using ordinary laptops, tablets, and phones, the connection will probably be via

802.11g. At less than 24Mbits/sec (or 12Mbit/sec throughput), that's +23dBm transmit power and -83dBm receive sensitivity. Antenna gains are an optimistic +8.5dBi.

Loco M2 TX power +23 dBm TX coax loss 0 TX ant gain +8.5 dBi Distance 150ft (0.0284 miles) = -73.3 dB path loss Brick losses -5.5dB RX ant gain -4 dBi (typical for a smartphone) RX coax loss 0 RX sens -83 dBm Fade margin ??? When I add it all together, I get a receive signal level of -51.3 dBm and a fade margin (SOM) of 31.7 dB which is quite good. You should have no problem making this thing work.

You can also use the Ubiquity NanoStation LocoNSM2 which has a larger antenna and more transmit power, but costs $100. Beamwidth is 60 degrees. See Pg 10 and 11.

Loco NSM2 TX power +28 dBm TX coax loss 0 TX ant gain +10.4 dBi Distance 150ft (0.0284 miles) = -73.3 dB path loss Brick losses -5.5dB RX ant gain -4 dBi (typical for a smartphone) RX coax loss 0 RX sens -83 dBm Fade margin ???

That yields a receive signal level of -40.4 dBm and fade margin (SOM) of 42.6 dB. That's better than the LocoM2 and would probably be a better choice (at twice the price).

So, what could go wrong?

I didn't include the effect of the steel fence, which is going to have an effect. I can't calculate the exact effect without knowing its exact position and elevation of the access point. My guess(tm) is it will be negligible if you mount the antenna with 4ft of clearance.

I'm a bit worried about the laptops, phones, and tablets at the neighbors. They might be trying to use them in an RF reflective environment, which might cause some cancellation.

When you're outside, there's always a chance of picking up some interference from other wi-fi systems. Be prepared to change your AP channel if that happens. You'll need a Atheros PoE adapter.

Good luck and I hope this setup will work for you.

As I told Rod Speed, and as I tell him again, your information trumps mine. I don't mind correction, as the correct answer is all that matters.

I was afraid of that, which is a critical error on my part, but I didn't look up the specs for the horizontal and vertical beam width at 150 feet.

This should prove to Rod Speed that your observations trump mine!

This is an important point that the antenna needs to be relatively low gain, just to paint the entire house.

Wouldn't it work though, even with a nanobeam or powerbeam, if there was a second matching antenna on the outside wall of the neighbor's house at 150 feet away?

I concur. When I have about 12dBm between the noise level and the received signal, I generally connect. This is better than that, by a lot (if you assume the noise is in the -90dBm range).

Probably not. If you had one radio, a power divider, and two antennas, you would get an antenna pattern that looks like a daisy flower. Lots of big lobes with giant coverage holes in between. If you installed two radios and two antennas on the same channel, it would also create a rather bizarre antenna pattern. If they were on different channels, it would work, but then walking from one side of the house to the other would require switching access points.

The receiver noise level is included in the calculation of the receiver sensitivity, which uses an SNR (signal to noise ratio) as a reference level. It's the RF level at which the SNR (signal to noise ratio) is equal to the minimum necessary to obtain a BER (bit error rate) of either 1x10^-5 or a PER (packet error rate) of 10%. You really don't want to operate at this level where you loose 1 packet out of 10 packets sent, which is why the fade margin or SOM (system operating margin) of 10-20dB is added to obtain a usable operating level.

RF is magic.

Hey Jeff,

Since I am all about helping people, I already wrote this up for people like Rod Speed to follow, written on Feb 20th of this year for this specific Nanobeam attached to my Linksys WRT54G wired extender.

- How to set up Ubiquiti Nanobeam M2 as an Access Point, wired to a wired extender, on WISP?

Does my writeup look detailed enough to you for Rod Speed to accurately follow to successful completion?

The default password is ubnt, not ubn.

Your instruction are probably good enough. I can't check them unless I have a unit in front of me. I did a quick skim and didn't find anything that might be a problem. Well, maybe offering instructions for XP, when most users are probably on Win 10. I really like that you include what to expect on the screen or lights after making a change. That's often missing from instructions. However, posting such multistep instructions to Usenet can be a problem. Make a mistake, or want to add something, and you're stuck. Next time, I suggest you make it a web page or sharable Google document, make changes online as needed, format it better, and point a link to it instead.

Hint: Don't write instruction in the past tense as if it were a port mortem. Mixing past and present is also bad. Use only the present tense as if you're walking someone through it step by step.

I noticed that you included disabling AirMax when using it as an AP. That's where I first screwed up, and where most others seem to do the same. AirMax=ON is the default, which is not what you want. You should probably emphasize the importance of this setting.

Jeff Liebermann wrote

Like I said, the AP would be where the camera is, but higher, at about 9' above the ground instead of the camera which is about

5' from the ground.

It wouldn't cross the fence, the fence is to the right of the path from the AP to the back of the neighbour's house.

I'm more inclined to use an omni at the AP, mainly because the Ubiquiti UAP-AC-M comes with that and is very easy to mount and I can just put it on a pole on the fence line closer to their house if it doesn't work well mounted on the barge board of my flat roof closest to their house. Given that the Medion wifi repeater is omni an works fine there and just needs to be power cycled much too often to be convenient.

Yeah, mine too since the fence is only 5' high and the AP would be at 9' at least on the barge board and trivial to mount it higher than that given that it can be mounted on a pole.

I'm not aware of much RF reflective stuff at all inside their house.

No mirrors at all in the main room or kitchen.

Sure, that's easy.

The UAP-AC-M comes with one.

Thanks for that, and the calculations and comments.

Ok, it's not a problem except that there might be a rather large reflection from the fence. No way to predict the effects of that (if any) without doing ray tracing, which is way too much complicated.

The typical rubber ducky 2.4Ghz antenna has about 0dBi gain. That means you'll lose 8.5dB of fade margin. You can afford that and it should work. However, if you get the bright idea of using an omni with some gain, you're going to have a problem due to the differences in height between your AP at 10ft elevation and the users at ground level. Omni antennas with gain have fairly narrow vertical beamwidths and a tendency towards uptilt, where the major lobe of the pattern is pointed above the horizon. It's very likely that all the RF will end up going over the neighbors house or into the sky, with little RF getting into the house. If you insist on using a removable antenna, I suggest one of the numerous 8dBi patch or panel antennas found on eBay. Something like this: Watch out for the sex (polarity) of the SMA connector. The beamwidth of an 8dBi patch is about 90 degrees, so it should work without any loss in fade margin. Actually, if I tear apart a Nanostation LocoM2, it probably has a similar patch antenna inside. Googling... Yep: The lower photo is the M2, the upper is the higher gain NSM2.

I've seen too many situations where "it works" really means "it works as long as I don't move or change anything". I rather prefer to run the numbers to see if it should work and with how big a margin before passing judgment.

Good luck. This should be easy (famous last words).

Sorry, crappy photo and muddled description. This should hopefully be clearer: Upper photo: NanoStation2 NSM2 Lower photo: NanoStation2 LoCo M2