I think the AF5 should be legal over here, at least, the lower bands are license free up to 1W transmit power. Not used the AF5 at all yet, it's quite new, and the only AF24 experience I have is only ~1000m worth of distance so comparatively easy to make work. Either way you latched onto the point, which is "Where there's a will, there's a way". In a lot of ways the UK is significantly more forward-thinking in terms of what can be done with DSL lines, the US LECs really aren't very imaginative. Who ever thought I'd be praising BT. On 27 March 2014 10:10, William Waites <wwaites@tardis.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 05:09:05AM +0000, Warren Bailey wrote:
It's not 802.11 and it doesn't act that way.
Actually most of the installations I've seen -- and my day job is working with community networks around Scotland that have built all manner of strange things -- the problems most often have nothing at all to do with the physical layer. More often they're related to doing things with spanning tree that we all learned in networking long ago to not do, or running many layers of NAT because IP routing is not understood. Things like that.
The only common RF problem is leaving the channel selection on "auto". Which invariably means one radio, like an access point with a sector antenna, can't hear the point to point link coming in to the dish behind it and picks the wrong channel.
Again, yes, you're right, you have to understand how this stuff works and think a little bit when you build, but your messages saying "It's really really hard" are coming across a little like FUD.
A pair of Air Fiber is like 3k USD, and at 24ghz you had better know
The AF24 are also illegal here. Or rather the lower channel belongs to the police, and the upper channel is limited to a very low output power. We have a pair of these, with a special non-operational license from Ofcom to put them through their paces. They do work, though they are a pain to align and subject to rain fade. They are on the West coast which is very rainy. Right now we're using them to measure rain intensity rather than to carry real traffic (which we can't do with a non-op license anyways).
-w