Downtilt; Weather Radar; Range And Throughput Planning - Cambium Networks PMP 400 Series Configuration And User's Manual

PMP 400/430 and PTP 200/230 Series Configuration and User Guide

Downtilt

The standard AP antenna produces a 3 dB beam elevation (up and down) of 5°, with near-in null fill that
allows good coverage of close-in SMs that otherwise would be affected by the narrow pattern. This is a
narrower pattern than operators may be used to with standard Canopy's 60° 3 dB beam, and may require
down tilt on the antenna. The bracket of the standard antenna has provision for measured down tilt. The
recommended practice is to use one of the many radio analysis and mapping tools or on-line tools to
calculate down tilt based on antenna height above the service area.

Weather Radar

Spectrum between 5600 and 5650 MHz (sometimes called the "weather notch") is used by some weather
radar and is not allowed for use by regulations in some regions, including US, Canada and, for new
equipment, Europe. When the Canopy module is set to either of those regions (configured on the
Configuration => General page of the module), it will not allow configuration of the appropriate frequencies,
as shown in Table 10. Even in regions where use of the spectrum between 5600 and 5650 MHz is allowed,
the best practice is to not use these channels if there are any other usable channels available. Only use the
channels in this "weather notch" after monitoring the spectrum for a week or more using a spectrum analyzer
to ascertain the spectrum is clear and there is no weather radar in the area that will cause interference to
your Canopy system.

Range and throughput planning

PMP 430 and PTP 230 5.4 and 5.8 GHz series modules provide 45+ Mbps aggregate throughput at
distances of 1.2 miles (1.92 km) and 2.3 miles (3.68 km) respectively. PMP 400 and PTP 200 Series
modules provide up to 21 Mbps aggregate throughput at distances of 1.4 miles (2.25 km) in RF
environments with clear line-of-sight and low background interference levels. Additional performance details
are shown in Table 8 on page 37. RF environments with occluded Fresnel zones or higher background
interference levels may give lower, but still very good, performance, depending on the specifics of the
environment.
Similar to standard Canopy, at any given instant, any radios operating at 1X or 2X take more "air time" to
transmit a given amount of data than if they were running at 3X. Similar to standard Canopy, PMP 400/430
and PTP 200/230 Series modules may see reduced total throughput when handling traffic with a high
percentage of small packets.
The effect of this, again similar to standard Canopy, is that at any given instant total throughput depends on

Mix of links running at 3X, 2X, and 1X

Mix of packet sizes
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