Wireless links - RIKZBLOG

The company uses a lot of wireless links to support various business functions, we have quite a few tricky to reach buildings on quays and across roads (not to mention on water/in the air, etc!) and the advent of bridgeable wireless solutions there has been an accessible route to enable these remote offices to get connected.

Now a few years on and much of the equipment has reached the end of it’s usable life – a couple of suppliers have mentioned to me over the past year that power adaptors tend to wear out and stop providing the correct supply causing problems. But in any case failures are becoming more commonplace.

Perhaps more so than equipment wear we have also been suffering from two other issues; wireless saturation and refraction (or fresnel zone interference)

A recent survey in Penzance showed that in a single quadrant there was in excess of 20 separate 2.4ghz wireless signals and the majority of these were located on the “non-overlapping” channels (1, 6 and 11) so what was once a sparsely populated area was now full of xboxes and bt home hubs as well as business kit and public services – saturated in other words.

As for refraction that is a blog post in it’s own! One that I will save for another (far more boring!) time. Suffice it to say that within the fresnel zone of your wireless signal artifacts can cause issues with signal, artifacts being trees, buildings, etc.

In order to combat all of this I carefully paced out and measured (as best I could) my area and even went back to school to re-learn how to work out angles, time/distance calculations and eventually (via the solwise link below) utilising a link calculator to work out my link budget so I could establish which kit I would need and where it needed to be placed to work!

A really sound piece of advice I was given was to rip out our 2.4.ghz kit and replace with 5ghz. This is proving to be a winner for me, there are various improvements, one of the important ones being that there is distinct separation between channels in the 5ghz range rather than, with 2.4ghz, bleeding between channels, rendering issue one above irrelevant.

My first B2B link was from our office in Penzance to our quayside Freight office. The guys there had been suffering with a rubbish link for a while now, and to keep it brief, a stronger, taller antenna mount, coupled with a pair of these has been a vast improvement. Now, rather than when will the link drop each day it’s which day do they have an outage, they happen so rarely now it’s almost as if we all forget it’s a wireless link – much better than it used to be!

The second link is slightly more ambitious, Land to Ship. Again utilising the same kit as the Freight link but this time on-board the Scillonian we have one of these with an external antenna mounted outside. Below is an image of the mount and the antenna, don’t worry, the joint will be covered in self-amalgamating tape soon, but the bracket is a custom job from Penzance Dry Dock (many thanks guys!) and seems strong enough for me to stand on!

Considering the importance of both of these links and the relatively low cost in equipment (I will confess to being fortunate enough to be helped with custom brackets, men in cherry pickers, but nothing that couldn’t be achieved with an assistant and some ladders) these upgrades have been exceptional value, and I will be extending the use of the 5ghz equipment to our other ships and St Marys, plenty to keep me busy for now!