GETTING TO THE POYNT –ePoynt(ing) your router – FAQ

At the end of November we conducted a webinar titled: ePoynt (ing) your Router, where we discussed Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) applications.

The webinar focused on our ePoynt product series. With the ePoynt you can integrate a router into the POYNTING antenna enclosure for a top end solution. The new ePoynt antenna series is designed to give solutions the edge by housing the LTE or 5G router in the antenna enclosure.

Below our FAQ’s based on the webinar.

Determining the distance is a complex issue determined by many factors, apart from the Gain of the Antenna, that will influence the signal such as:

  1. Line of sight?
  2. Frequency of the reception i.e. which LTE/4G/5G Radio Band (frequency) is being received? – the LTE Router will automatically select the best of the frequencies for the given Mobile Network Operator (MNO).
  3. Reflections from buildings, water, mountains etc. nearby can enhance the signal through the use of the‘ crosspolarized 2x dipoles’ in the ePoynt-1/-2 enhancing the signal.
  4. The Antenna Gain and/or Antenna ‘Tilt’ of the MNOT ower– MNO’s Antennas havea special Antenna on their Tower where they can ‘beam’ the Antenna (Vertically) using various techniques to cover a  particular area and they carefully plan this coverage; Just complete the ‘picture’- Horizontally most MNO Antennas‘ covers ’120° per‘ sector’, there for e3x Antennas x 120° = 360° coverage around the Tower.

a. A note on the above; we’ve had questions about the Output Power from the Tower; that doesn’t really influence the ‘distance’ as the limiting factor. It is the output Power of the router which is much smaller than that of the Tower.

We are setting up a basic calculator that will give indications of the distance, and that can be expected given the factors mentioned above.

Not yet, most of the customers we know of make use of Power-over-Ethernet (POE), a standard way of providing Power over the Data Cable (the Ethernet cable).

A 2×2 Router should always be connected to the Main/Div pair of connectors i.e. with the ePoynt-2, the client would most probably want to make use of the ‘directional’ Cross-Polarized Antennas (the ‘reason’ for the ‘extra expense’ of buying a ePoynt-2).

On the ePoynt-1, the client must decide whether or not to connect to the Vertical/Horizontal dipole pair of the ePoynt-1 which will be Cell-1; Main/Div or whether to connect to the -45°/+45° dipole pair which is on Cell-2; Main/Div.

The Teltonika Router was set up with a POE injector through Ethernet Port 1. Passive POE over spare pairs (available from HW revision 0007 and batch number 0010). Possibility to power up through LAN port.

We only tested with Teltonika (RUT-240, RUT-955 & RUTX-14) and ‘GreenPacket’ (4 x 4) up to now, but we will be testing with more routers in future. The Antennas perform well with any type of router, the only compatibility to take into account would be the space available inside the router housing and the temperature (Power consumption/Temperature gradient) generated by the router.

The Antennas will accommodate any communication medium (router-/radio type) within the frequency range specified in the Technical Specification.

The ‘compression gland/ethernet pass through’ is quite large but one may need to feed the 4 x CAT-6 Ethernet cable through the compression gland and terminate (‘crimp’) the RJ-45 connector on the inside of the ePoynt router ‘compartment’.

We haven’t yet investigated any such telescopic poles. Our suggestion is to have a look at some of the Marine Hardware Installation Company’s websites for such telescopic poles.

From practical experience, we can tell that we’ve had a 4 x 4 router installed in a ePoynt-2 (in direct sunlight) which has an ‘Idle Power’ Spec. of <4W and a ‘Max. Power’ Spec. of 22W with ambient temperature here in the Southern Hemisphere (South Africa) reaching 33°C without any degraded performance. Having said that, we have installed ePoynt units with various router configurations at POYNTING’s Headquarters with temperature probes inside attached to data loggers to do actual temperature vs. performance testing, and the results will be published on our Website when complete.

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