 Welcome to the RFLMS unlicensed podcast. I'm Caleb Nour and we're joined here with Toss-O-Sallows. What's happening, brother? What's going on? What's up Caleb? How are you doing? How are you doing today, man? Good man. Good man. I'm excited because I'm a big old boy And we've been working on this menu for the Titan Fest that's coming up here and I am pretty pumped, dude. Yeah, yeah, me too. I'm just thinking of all the yum-yums we're gonna have. Like I said, I think we should change it to Wagyu Fest from Titan Fest, but either way, yeah, lots of progress being made on the menu activities and other things to do with the venue in and around that weekend. So hope to see a lot of people out there. Hope to see a lot of new faces this time as well. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. So and again, I like to eat, bring some toms just in case we want to get the meat sweats and stuff, but no, good, good. That's been, it's been a lot of work, you know, when we first started this thing, we're like, oh, how hard could it be? And now we're like, well, we see how hard it is. But yeah, as it grows, obviously, it gets more difficult. But I mean, really, the event itself is is quite chill. It's really geared towards socializing and making relationships with other wisps and stuff like that. I mean, there's no marketing, there's no sales pitch, no nothing. It's just really about coming, you know, talking, sharing your thoughts and ideas with other wisps, you know, commiserating a little bit too, you know, because we know running a wisp is a stressful business. So there's nothing better than hanging around, having a few cocktails with your brother and sister of wisps and talking about those problems and talking through all that stuff. So I really look forward to it. Yeah, I do too. And some of those pain points, actually, I think we'll talk here about a little bit, got a little idea of some fun topics. But things here have been good, you know, with me just working on just normal sort of stuff, had a number of ultra horn conversations this week. Apparently that's the topic of the week from folks. So doing point to point links, you know, and it's that standard sort of how far how fast kind of deals. So and in the end, I mean, it really boils down to throwing everything in a link calculator. But I think what's important to sort of point out there is you really need to understand some of the base things that you're put in. So transmit power. Here's where everyone sort of stumbles up as they're learning how to do this is let's say you've got an airfiber 5xd, 5xhd, yes, that one. So they're like, oh, transmit power on this link calculation. Well, the radio will do 30. So I put in 30 and folks don't realize that, hey, man, like it's not going to push 30db when you're talking about trying to run 10x or 12x. You know, 10x cap is like 20, 12x cap is like 12 or something. So those are the numbers you need to punch in, run through the calculator, get your receive, see what we say for the MCS rates, but also double check it against the spec sheet. Really easy to do, but a lot of folks don't realize that. So luckily, you know, I'll lay it all out and it only takes about once or twice playing around with it. And then once you install it in a real world, then it's just super repeatable for all. So yeah, I get that a lot. I get that a lot too on a day by day basis as well. Not only, let's say for the ultra horn, right, but really for all the antennas, right, you know, like, you know, people post like, hey, I thought, you know, RF elements horns had high gain. It's like, well, that's a pretty generic statement. We make 11 horns. So yeah, if you're talking the ultra horn 24 DBI, that really is a lot of gain, you know, and you're talking about our symmetrical 90 degree horn or something like that, that's only like nine and a half, 10 DBI of gain. So really, I think getting people to understand the differences between all the products that we have, there is no just one horn, right? And there's not just one gain. And then in general too, right, you know, what is high gain, right? You know, high gain compared to what? So yeah, there's a lot of that out there and stuff like that. And, you know, I just, I just love trying to get out there and educate people and show them the ins and outs because it's not just for us. It's for any antenna, right? It's not just our antenna or antennas. Yeah, exactly. And actually that sort of segues in cleanly, segue, not planned, but, you know, I was thinking about topics we can talk about this week. And I think one of the fun things that we could do is talk a bit about what are common sort of mistakes and stumbles and things like that, that the new whisper, you know, a smaller whispers are getting turned up. Where are these sort of common areas where people sort of fall down? You know, we, you and I have never really been full time professional whists, but I've had a baby whist. I know you've had done a ton of projects. I've both been doing this forever. So long time we've committed, committed our own fair share of mistakes. I can guarantee you that we've seen. Oh yeah, yeah, I've done nothing but everything perfect since the beginning. Yeah, some of these examples are totally not for personal experience. So network loops asking for a friend. Yeah, asking for a friend. I had a friend telling me that making a broadcast storm on a flat network was a thing you should have avoid. Yeah, so I've had friends tell me that, you know, RSTP is there on purpose. So that way you can create bridge loops and that way it'll fix it. Yeah, because that never fails. So so we thought it'd be kind of fun to talk about some of these topics. Nothing really in order not calling anybody out or any companies or anything like that. And, you know, if we if we give recommendations, it's not, you know, hey, an all inclusive, you should definitely go with that. But I think it'd be cool just to kind of think about on this Friday afternoon here, some of the crazy things we've seen and what we can do to help people get through that. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So I think the first biggest mistake that a new WISP gets into is not understanding base RF principles. Now, I'm not saying you need to have a doctorate level RF engineering degree to get in the start by any means whatsoever. So yeah, yeah, I don't have any sort of RF emphasis at all in my background, you know, from school and stuff. So, you know, you can learn so much of this on your own, but there's a core set of principles that I think you need to understand so that you can look at a system, you can look at a spec sheet and look at an antenna spec sheet and figure out what you need to do. So I mean, you see this all the time, like what you're just talking about gain. Gain is the the biggest trip out because they they see it as a binary number and they're like, oh, this gain is X. And that's the only thing that matters about an antenna. And we've we definitely know that is not the case. No, not at all. Not at all. You know, spec sheets are often quite misleading as well because we know specifically on antennas that that gain changes. And, and, you know, a lot of this kind of misunderstanding is really driven by unfortunately, you know, a lot of the manufacturers in the space. Sometimes, you know, they they like to put the fastest speed at the longest distance on the box, let's say for radio. And, you know, so that makes somebody who's new to the industry think, well, I can do one gig at 20 miles or something like that. And, you know, not understanding. It's like you can get the fastest speed at the shortest distance or the longest distance at the slowest speed, right? And those things aren't always explained. And that's what drives a lot of kind of, again, the initial thoughts and things that the Wisps have when they first enter the market in there. I mean, because there's so much equipment to pick from, there's so much information there to kind of bring in, verify and sort through that. It could be quite cumbersome for a newcomer, for sure. So definitely if you're a new Wisp out there, man, don't don't be scared to ask questions. This is definitely not a knock at you. We have all all have been there. Once before, I don't know anybody who who came in, was an expert from day one and continues to be an expert. That's just that's, you know, unheard of in many cases. Yeah. And it's, you know, there's so much information that's out there and available now, but it can almost be a little bit of a hindrance because you just get overwhelmed by all this stuff. And they're like, oh, cool, I should believe it. So when you look at this, you know, the website for, I don't know, a 24 gig link that says it'll do 20 K, you're like, sweet. I'm going to shoot this 24 gig link 15 miles and it's going to be great. And then don't understand that, you know, if it thinks about raining outside of the things in the ground, right? So, and then especially sometimes sales reps run into this before. You're like, yeah, I would do that. That's what the spec sheet says. And they show the customer and then you're like, all right. So you're going, I'm going to tell you this once. This is not how this works. So not at all. For an all zone, for an all zone blows up a lot of people because it blows me up. I don't even know how to properly calculate it myself. I know it's there, right? I know that it's the even ones are good and the odd ones are bad or vice versa. I actually have to go look that up to be correct in that. But that's something like I get it all the time. It's like, well, I can see the top of the AP, right? And it's like, that doesn't mean that, you know, that that's clean line of sight. It doesn't work that way. I had a friend jammed himself up real bad a long time ago with a very expensive set of equipment, doing some sort of similar thing and got real good at figuring out how for now zones work. So you're like, oh, I can see over the top of this building, you know, on this 20 mile link. Well, yeah, you could, but not quite enough. It's actually on a low bandwidth or a low frequency link. So yeah, get that first main one. The link calculators that are available now do a lot better job of showing you the for now. It's because then before they wouldn't, so it's real easy to kind of get bound up doing that sort of thing. Yeah, let's see. There's also a lot in the kind of line of sight versus near line of sight versus no line of sight as well. And misconceptions there, especially when you start looking at different frequencies, right, that you can operate in, right? You know, 900 megahertz doesn't work like 2.4 gigahertz. Doesn't work like five gigahertz doesn't work like, you know, all the other frequencies that are out there. Some have better attenuation specs than others. And just because, you know, a particular frequency might have good attenuation specs based on the wavelength, you know, the modulation rate of the radio is really important. I've had a lot of really old time, old time customers who are doing like 900 megahertz, sped sprectum, you know, like freaking 16 K kind of, you know, low low bandwidth serial communications with 900. And you can go pretty far and through a lot of things with that, you know, and then all of a sudden 900 megahertz, you know, kind of broadband radios came out, you know, ubiquity came out with the XR9, the SR9 and all that stuff. And now you're talking megabits, right? Higher modulation rates. And these kind of old timers were like, well, geez, you know, I used to 900 megahertz went through all these walls before. No problem. It's like, yeah, because it was doing FSK, you know, for modulation. And now you're at 16 or 64 quam. I was like, you know, things change. So it's not it's not all relative. It's not all the same. You can't really take sometimes your initial experience with something from a while ago and just say, this is the way it works now because frequency equals same. You know, it doesn't work like that. There's 900 serial radios where you configured them with dip switches and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Done that. So then like five years later, you're like, oh, I've got this 900 megahertz logo I could put and he's saying Yagi's and it's going to do the same thing. You're like, oh, wait, that's not how actually any of this works. Not at all. Not at all. It's even even as you go into higher frequencies, right? You know, there's reflections that sometimes can help, you know, and there's reflections that sometimes can can hurt you, right? So there's there's a lot of a lot of things. You know, the general rule of thumb, though, is the lower the frequency, the more kind of structural or obstacle penetration you get for it. But it's not it's not like a night and day thing. And it really really depends on the radio really depends on the radio what it's trying to do on that particular frequency, right? Like, you know, 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi versus like, you know, 2.4 2.5 LTE totally different things, right? Now people think, well, hey, you know, 2.5 gigahertz LTE goes miles and, you know, goes through your house and I get, you know, speed test at home of 50 meg. But, you know, at 2.4, I can only go, you know, through half a tree sometimes, right? So what's the difference? I mean, people don't understand that LTE is a lot more power, right? Than 2.4 Wi-Fi is. So really you have to understand, again, all the inner workings behind these different protocols, different frequencies and different, you know, standards that are out there. Yeah, like ERP, super basic are a fundamental thing that a lot of people don't get. And apparently it matters and it's legal because we all had to know the rules back in the day because you could just set anything back. Like the FCC would certify ham sandwich back in the day. Like they didn't care, nobody cared. You could just turn it up to whatever. But then the radio popo started showing up and started enforcing some things. So there was a lot of crack down, but even then you can set some goofy stuff. So, and understanding, you know, even the 365 CBRS that you can push 50 dB out of now, I mean, that drives a lot of those further distances. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then you go into the much higher frequency, right? 60 gig versus 80 gig, right? So you have these incredible throughputs of gigabit over gigabit over the air. But again, the distances are incredibly short, right? So again, they're not all the same, 80 gig, you get a lot more throughputs, you can push a lot more power, but you have other obstacles, right? 60 gigahertz is more near the wavelength of the water molecule, so you have more attenuation. Or whatever, yeah, exactly. 24 is water, 60 is oxygen. And of course, nobody knows what rain fate is or that there's a calculation for that or anything else, so. Yeah, so there's things like that that are really important to understand and, you know, going back to your EIRP statement, right? That's another big thing that, you know, I obviously I'm on social media all the time, so I see all the posts and constantly, you know, crawling through them and just reading what people are saying and what people are doing and you'll get somebody who says, you know, I did X amount of link, you know, with this gain antenna and stuff like that and I'm getting this kind of throughput, right? Well, you don't know what kind of power they're pushing, right? So then you have somebody else that says, well, he used this smaller antenna, right? And he went this distance, so I should be able to, but that other person is following the law and doing EIRP and he's like, well, I can't go half that distance, why, right? Because you didn't get the other part of the question. It was like, well, you know, what was the DBM set to on that radio and how much power are you pushing, you know? Yeah, and it's different for countries and everything and with international forums and stuff, I mean, some places are still a lot less or there's some crazy stuff there. Yeah, so definitely when you're on social media and you mentioned a good thing because the world is now globalized, right? You know, a lot of these forums have people from all over the world joining it. So if you see somebody that says, you know, hey, I did this kind of incredible link at this incredible distance, you know, you should probably click on their profile and see where they're from, right? Because I mean, if you look at like Latin America, Africa and stuff, you know, it's like the Wild Wild West sometimes, right? So they're running it at full, full speed and full power, you know, as high as the radio can possibly go in a lot of cases. And again, this could mislead you into believing that you can do it when you try and run it legally here in the U.S. specifically. Yeah, now social media, well, I got a separate rant on that one. We'll get to that here in a minute. Let's see, the last RF fundamental, OF, or excuse me, modulation rates and how those work. That's another thing that people don't understand and things like 5G, non-linosite 5G Radius because they're like, oh, we have OFDM, or excuse me, OFDM. So we can work in multi-path and if you put the radios up and you balance the signals off a certain set of buildings just right, yes, maybe it'll make a connection but they're like, well, that's non-linosite. So if I shove this thing into an evergreen forest, it's just gonna work too because the spec sheet says in the LOS and it's not how that works. So just in general, stay out of the trees unless you're working with band and equipment that's specifically meant to run that. Yeah, and again, that kind of goes also with radio types and not understanding. So, you know, you'll see somebody out there that let's say for an example does, you know, a X amount of distance link with let's say a B5C backhaul radio from Amosa. Well, that's a 256-quam radio, right? So people will associate that distance, those antennas, blah, whatever, to that distance and then they'll say, all right, well, I know now that I can all of a sudden go that same distance with a AirFiber 5 HD, right? Or LTU, which is a 1024-quam radio or now even the newer Cambium, the Force 400 series, which does 1024-quam and soon 4096-quam, it's not the same. The distance is practically almost half, right? So if you see somebody do a 10-mile link on a 256-quam radio, chances are it's really, you know, five miles or something like that on a 1024-quam radio. Because again, not just the modulation rate's more complex and therefore there's more challenges for getting those longer distances, but the radio's maximum TX output power is also a lot lower, right? So, you know, we can talk, you know, on and on and on about the other things that people do on these high-modulation radios trying to force them to do higher power. Yes, you may get the signal strength you want, you might get that connection you want, but all of a sudden you're like, why am I getting half the speed I should? Because the radio's just spitting out junk and creating errors and that's part of the reason why you're probably not gonna see the speeds that you want, you know, with channel width. God, I can just go on and on, right? Oh, God, no. Channel width, nobody ever asked what channel size are you running? So again, they see somebody do this huge link and they think it's awesome and then they try and do it in an 80 or 100 megahertz wide channel. Like, why is this thing falling apart? So many important things. Again, a lot of things we're saying, I know we're kind of giggling and stuff, it's really not, we're not really trying to call anybody out or do that. We just really honestly want to point it out and let the new people know that that's part of growing, that's part of your learning process and that's part of being new. So hopefully we can name and pick all these different things that we see people do that aren't 100% up to date on how all these things work and we can hopefully help you not make those mistakes and therefore it's not about doing the right thing all the time, but it's about asking the right question. So when you see a link or somebody doing something that you're trying to accomplish, you now know what to ask them about that link so that way you can duplicate it for yourself. 100%. So look at the spec sheet of your radios and antennas and even if you have a basic understanding of what these fields and stuff means, you're gonna be leagues ahead of a lot. So like back in the day, yeah, that channel width. Now the first time I tried to shoot a 10 mile link across Atlanta on a 40 meg wide channel and I was like, hey, I got like a big 53 on this and my throughput was in the like, I don't know, 12 kilobits per second or something. I'm like, what noise, what is this? And there's not really good written documentation on a lot of this stuff. I mean, a lot of these radios support because the standard supports 80 or 100 megahertz channel but the firmware is just not baked for that channel width as well. So I mean, there's just so much you need to know. I mean, should we talk about firmware versions on radios and what's stable, what's not? Just because it's new doesn't mean it's best. If your link's not broke, don't try and fix it, because chances are you'll break something else, so. Those are the two biggest problems to see with firmware. It's either they upgrade everything to the release version, like new version comes out, they're like, I'm pumping it out that night, right? You should probably let someone else fall on that sword or they won't upgrade or just use whatever is out of the box. Dude, I've seen so many people, they're like, hey, I got these radios and I put them up last week and I'm having these problems and you're remote in. I'm like, dude, this firmware's four years old and not realizing that at manufacturing and by the time it works it's through supply chain, it could have old firmware on it. And they load base images, they don't update those that often, so if you have the luxury of running on a Wisp and maybe have a tower or even a sector where you've got some friendly customers, some Tinker customers, right? The test setup, yeah. The test setup where, and everyone's like, oh, you should lab test this thing. Well, realistically, it's hard to get a realistic, variable-driven lab setup with 20 clients and whatever else. Like it's not gonna work. In the lab, in your office, in your warehouse, don't even bother. No, I do like a base upgrade to make sure it doesn't wreck your config file because I've been burned by like parse breakers and stuff like that, but if you can bribe a sector to cheap friends or family, drop a discount or, I don't know, some barbecue or something on their doorstep, let them be the Tinker guys, that is definitely a great opportunity to make sure that you're upgrading cleanly and do it smoothly because that's the last thing you want to do is break the whole network, and especially on one where you can't recover, you drop the subs and then that's an absolute nightmare. Also, maybe don't upgrade the entire network at one time either. Yeah. Been there, done that, and you do it that night, everything looks great, and the next morning, your support manager is about to cut your head off, so those are a couple of ideas there. Yeah, definitely, definitely. All right, let's see, oh, another big one. So we mentioned this earlier, there is so much information out there, but you gotta be careful. So let's say, if you're building your entire educational experience on a forum or WIFS Talk or something like that, you've gotta realize that there's a wealth of information and knowledge, and it's so valuable, but at the same time, anybody can post there, like any jack leg, there's no real barrier, right? Anybody. You can even say that the SNR on there is kind of bad. Waka waka! That's my favorite joke that nobody gets, right? I didn't get it, so you wanna explain it again? Huh, so the signal to noise ratio in the forums are bad because it's very loud, but the quality is low, so. All right, maybe it's not as funny as I thought. Somebody out there, if anybody thought that was remotely in using, let me know. If not, I don't know, just ignore it anyways. I'll give you a refund back for what you paid for this, so. But no, for real, there's just so much out there, but even on the big forums, the community forums for the various manufacturers and stuff, you're like, oh, this is the way that I do it, and I've got 23,000 likes or comments, like yeah, that's great, but that doesn't mean they're practical experience, you do one thing versus the other way. There's just so many ways to do things. So I always take those views with a little bit of grain of salt and look at where they're coming from, like Toss mentioned earlier, it's different for countries. They have different RF rules or what works for someone out in the eastern deserts of the Sahara in terms of long distance, high capacity, 60 gig lengths is not gonna work for you in Southern Florida, so you've gotta take context and location into account. A lot of people have their own sort of weird like ego driven things that they wanna do as well, I mean, it coming from a couple of guys that have their own sort of flashy ego things too, like that's a, you know, we're kind of throwing some rocks and glass houses here. My brisket's better than your brisket. Probably so, wait, give me a few months. I gotta get out of the practice before we get to this here time fast, but no, so there's just, and there's a lot of people with ulterior motives and especially it's kind of weird and when the controversial topics pop up, I don't know, like a Starlink or something like that, man, there's some kooky foe that hop, I don't know, so. And you have the fanboys, right? You have the fanboys that are out there as well, that it really doesn't matter. I mean, they'll just fight you tooth and nail just to be right for whichever company there are fanboys of. Everybody has them. I mean, I'm sure we have fanboys as well, right? So that's something that you guys ignore that. We love y'all, but the rest of them. I think with a lot of the other companies that are out there, there aren't many representatives of those companies coming out. Like for example, if, you know, let's say a fanboy of RF Elements comes out there and kind of says good things about the company, that's great, but if what he's saying is incorrect, I call them out. I don't call them out, but I mean like, I go in there and I correct the message, right? To say, you know, like if somebody says, yeah, RF Elements horns are perfect for everything. Well, that's not true, right? It's not, you know, not every horn that we have will fit every possible scenario. There's a lot of things you have to know in order to make that decision, right? So again, fanboys can be dangerous. They definitely can. They definitely can. So again, get second opinions, right? Ask again. And for the new wisps out there as well, there are, you know, some social media sites that are better. Like you just mentioned the Wisp talk, right? But you know, there's actually a Wisp talk for newbies, right? Which I think is great. A little friendlier for sure. Yeah, it is. It is. Well, you know, like, you know, if you post on Wisp talk, right? And you post something that has been discussed a million times before, you'll get people that come on there and be like, use the search function. You know, this has been mentioned many, many times before, right? So yeah, so if you go to Wisp talk, they're a little bit, you know, the people that are on there that want to support the Wisp talk newbie page are a little bit more tolerant, let's say. So it's kind of more of a safe space, you know, over to the newbie Wisp. But not that you shouldn't be part of a Wisp talk, right? But maybe it's a better place for you to post your questions. Again, I will say this as well. Please use the search function before you ask a question. I mean, that's just common courtesy. But yeah, there's so many posts in some of these well-established, been around forever groups that, yeah, sometimes it's kind of hard to find the answer, right? And I know it's easy to just type it out and ask, you know, so I see how that happens as well. But either way, like I said, yeah, definitely, you know, look for second opinions on whatever you're trying to do. Yeah, I do that. I tell people that a lot when they're like, should I upgrade this firmware? I always tell people, look, go to the manufacturer's community forum, look at their upgrade, realize that it's probably going to be the extreme. If there's any sort of little problem, people are gonna blow it out of proportion, but get a general feel for there. And then, you know, as things settle down, then hit up your Wisp talk or stuff. Like, what's your experience with, you know, this version or whatever else? And see what your peers in that group are reporting. And you'll get a pretty good consensus like that. So, you know, the Wisp talk is generally agnostic, so some questions fit better there. You know, some of the ones, you know, we get kicked back to someone's like, oh, they ask a question about your product on this manufacturer's forum. And they're, you know, they've got their own motos and everything too. So, you know, you gotta take contacts. You have to take contacts and location into account for sure. Yeah, and it's probably better. I mean, if it's a, you know, a manufacturer-specific question, you know, you should probably start at the manufacturer's forum or the manufacturer's Facebook group page, right? You know, start at the official place before you go ask the user base, perhaps is another option to consider. And if you're not finding an answer, nobody's responding, then, you know, hey, Wisp talk, you know, whatever, whatever other groups are out there, you can definitely go there, you know. And the answers that are coming through Wisp talk at like, I don't know, midnight on a Saturday may also be needed to be taking a little bit of grain of salt too. Well, but it depends, right? I mean, it could be again, from somebody in a different time zone, right? So, what's your midnight is somebody's, you know, noon and they're just chilling and looking for, you know, something to do. And, you know, they answer questions when they can. So, for sure, for sure. So, what are some other fun ones that I've seen recently? Oh, the, I'm going to build this whole ISP network on a fully flat network because routing is scary and it's hard to network. Friends don't let friends bridge networks, right? That's gym-patient, man, Linktex. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that message is a lot stronger now than it used to be. And I mean, I certainly fell for it back in the day. I've never been a strong network guy, like I can sort of hand fist my way through and can get some basic stuff done, some B lands and whatever else. But, you know, it gets too deep in the weeds. Like I'm the first to admit, I'm like, this is not my bag, baby. Like I'll tap out and bring somebody in. So, you know, when you're building your network, it's just, it's so hard in the beginning because you've got 800 different things you've got to try to figure out the RF side, the network side, the accounting side, the business side, the marketing side and all this. So, if you default to, well, this is the easiest way to set this up for now. You know, some of these things you can go back and fix later or build as you scale, but some of these core decisions are really gonna bite you because if you have to regut your entire network infrastructure, that's a lot different than being, hey, I need a better website. You know, those are two different worlds. So, you know, learn some basic networking if you're not gonna really get that deep into it. Definitely look at some consultants. And, you know, that's a whole another conversation than itself, which can get a little wild sometime. But if you decide that you wanna have someone else build that, look into them and, you know, that's definitely an option. There's a ton of people that run these sort of built networks like that. But, you know, planning on things like redundant back hauls, right? Or redundant, you know, main feeds. You gotta think about that. You gotta think about where you're on route at a tower or at the device. There's just so many different options. You need to have some sort of plan. You're gonna do that on a device or you're gonna do speed cues on a device or at the router or somewhere else. I mean, there's just a lot of things to consider. And like you said, forklifting those things later, you know, it's much more difficult than if you kind of, let's say, do it right from the beginning, you know, so. Yeah, and even if it kind of delays your first build or, you know, your first big expansion, it's definitely worth it. Absolutely. Oh, what are some other fun things people get blown up on when they first start? Let's see. Oh, billing. That's always a fun one. She's, we're gonna talk about software now. Yay. Yay, our favorite topic, which we're totally qualified to talk about, so. But, you know, it's been a very popular topic lately. And I mean, you know, that's not sexy. Like, even if you're network, even if you're RF, like back halls, towers, clam bang, like that's some sexy, fun stuff, right? And you see that money rolling in and that's great. But if you don't have a system that automates what that money rolling in is and you're spending, you know, if you've got to pay somebody to sit out there and, you know, write invoices for, you know, 20 people. Okay, yeah, you can do that in an evening. That's no problem. A hundred, 500, a thousand. If you're doing a manual process like that, you're paying like real money to get your money. And that's gonna all be handled. Yeah, there's definitely, again, a growing path for that as well and things that you seriously have to consider. You know, I mean, a lot of Wisps, like even my own company back in the day, I started with QuickBooks, you know, like a lot of Wisps do out there as well. And as you grow, like I said, you know, there's a lot of the things that seem simple in the beginning and a lot of it's fragmented, right? So you, you know, invoice out of QuickBooks, let's say, so that goes out, right? But then you have to log into maybe this other thing in order to run all the credit cards, you know, every month and then you have to go into this email program maybe to start, you know, emailing those invoices out to people and all that stuff is fragmented and takes a lot of time. Really, a lot of these billing systems out there, you know, and management systems like PowerCode, VSP, Sonar, and I'm sure there's a ton of other ones that kind of bring it all together. And they're really nice now because a lot of them are even tying in like inventory management and call center stuff and trouble-ticket systems and all this stuff, you get it in just one, you know, one panel, one software application really automates a lot of that stuff and makes it a lot easier. So I know, you know, a lot of these are, you know, pay per subscriber kind of a thing and that's why a lot of people get turned off, you know, some of them do it in the cloud, some of them require dedicated hardware on site and that's like, you know, 50-50, people are like, never cloud, never want to manage my own hardware, you know, so there's a religious debate there for sure. I'll let you guys figure out, you know, which one's better for you and who you want to listen to on that topic, but there's just so much more to that stuff and maybe, you know, that's an interesting segue into kind of later talking about, you know, what do Wisps want to see in our show? Maybe we should bring on some of these, like, you know, software platform companies as, you know, guests on our show. I think that would be pretty interesting to kind of talk about those differences or at least some experts that can kind of talk through, again, the differences between, you know, these different platforms or the functionalities of the platform, cloud versus, you know, hosted, you know, on site and stuff like that. I think that would be a really cool topic to talk about. Yeah, for sure. And there's, you know, there's so much variation between them and, you know, especially when you start integrating all these different systems and traffic control, it makes a lot of sense. I think, you know, in the beginning, fully accepting with the value proposition because people are like, oh, I see this dollar figure per sub and, you know, I don't want to lose that. I can do this myself. Well, if you've got, you know, a hundred folks, sure, you can do that, but you have a thousand, 2,000, 5,000 subs, you know, if you're trying to swivel chair between all these systems to get it done, you're probably going to die. And then so you've got to bring staff in and then at some point, you've got to figure out where those two lines cross where, you know, your OPEX versus CAPS expenses sort of make that happy little cross and figure out where it makes sense. So then you got to worry about the migration, right? The migration from manual to automated. So, you know, it's not like, you know, we're saying, you know, that you have to have one of these systems from day one, obviously, you got to make money. You got to make sure that you're doing the right thing as a wisp, right? And that the customers are signing up, your growth is happening, but there is that point where you cross and it's like, okay, from this point on, don't wait for the wisp to get too big before you do that because I've seen a lot of nightmares trying to migrate 500 plus and obviously beyond from, you know, the manual process to one of these kind of managed processes. And it's much like blowing up your core network. Like you blow up your billing and you're not getting paid that month, you're going to be in a world of heart real soon. Definitely, definitely. Yeah. So, yeah, maybe we can get somebody on here and talk about the differences and really explain what that value proposition is. I think that'd be great. I know some people. I think we can make that happen. Yeah, for sure. So, maybe we can get a couple of them, pin them against each other and have a barring fight. Not tell them. Just let it be a surprise. It could be like, what's his name? Zach Galifianakis, right? Between two ferns, you know what I mean? Between two zooms. Between two ferns or something like that and just have them fight each other and complain. No, mine is better, you know? We'll see how it works. That would be kind of funny. Okay, so now nobody's going to want to join the show. How we never get another guest again, yes. Yeah, or you bring the first one on but you don't let them know about the second one, right? And then once you kind of start the conversation, you bring in the opposing or the other company on, you know? 10 minutes in, that little zoom window pops up. You're like, hey, hey, catch me? So, let's see. That one, those are fine. The other one I've seen very recently, especially so we're in the summer season, right? So, grounding, grounding's a whole lot of conversation. But where I'm really seeing the smaller or newer whips get blown up right now is not having climbing people on staff, your tower climbers. So, I fully get that. I mean, dude, it is a hard, tough, dangerous, brutal job, right? It is painful. So, you know, a lot of people will opt to do all their big tower installs and stuff and contract out of crew and you know, that makes sense. It's, you know, especially when you're talking about some of those big arrays that we've got customers running 12 APs and all the pie to pie. Like it is a definite undertaking to get this done. But so they go and everything's running and great, but you know, you've got a tornado come through or a lightning storm blows some stuff up, you know? And if you're relying solely on contract people to swap these things out, I mean, you could be waiting a day, two days a week, you know? Because not only did it blow your stuff up, but it blew up everyone else's stuff. And the Silcos and everyone else. So, you know, I think what works, especially when you're small, if you train, certify, be safe, that's the biggest thing. Get your certifications. Definitely be safe. Get the equipment because you could hurt yourself real quick out there. But you know, even if you're climb competent, but you know, you've got somebody that can break face. You've got somebody that can swap out of radio that gets smoked or something like that. You're gonna be world better shape than waiting a week or two weeks. Cause that's where you see pockets of bad reviews when you're looking at some of these and you know, there'd be a whole pocket of a week long where everyone just destroyed the reviews cause they lost a tower because they had literally no one there to swap gear out. So, that's definitely something to take into account. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, oh man, those are, there's just so many things that a friend of mine have screwed up over the years that I totally don't have any experience with but thought I'd share. But let's go back, oh, the 24, the 24 gig one. Again, there's somebody out there that is selling 24 gigs of with a 20 kilometer range or more on their bigger units and that blows people up. But I think people picking the wrong backhaul really gets people in the grind sometimes. So, you know, it's so tempting now, especially now where you can get a 60 gig long distance backhaul with the ability to run these higher channels, you know, up into to 65 up to 69 gig and stuff on some of this equipment. You know, you can push some realistic distances but, you know, people will stretch these things really long, you've got a $300 backhaul of this feed in one of your primary sites. Like, you can really get yourself bound up and that's a whole different world versus well maybe you're just using it to feed a micropop or something. So, you really gotta take into account how do I backhaul this, what's the best way to do it? What makes sense now and in the future and where the money makes sense too? That's such a huge part of it. Definitely, definitely. Especially as a wisp grows, right? So, I mean, again, everything comes down to the Benjamins, right? It all comes down to the money and it's quite natural for a new wisp to start with unlicensed backhaul. So really the question is, you know, license, unlicense and when do you switch, right? So, unlicense is obviously very popular because it's easy, it's unlicense, you can do it, the equipment's cheap and stuff like that but, you know, there's a point where your network starts to grow, the distances you try and cover are much larger and there really is a point where a wisp needs to, needs to mature into the licensed side of backhalls. Not only, because license links can deliver way more data, right? I mean, I think Aviat, right, has like this 80 gig backhaul that people are posting recently I saw, like pushing nine gigs, right? So, you're really not gonna get that, you know, with some of the unlicensed five gig stuff, right? So, really, you know, as a new wisp, you have to kind of do the cost benefit for when do you transition from licensed to unlicensed, right? And from unlicensed to licensed. And really, not all backhalls are the same, right? So, you know, people would think that, okay, well I saw somebody post, you know, that an Aviat, let's say as an example, backhaul did nine gigs, right? So that means all licensed backhalls must be nine gig, right, and that's not the case. And you have different frequencies, right? You have six gig, 11 gig, 18 gig, 23 gig, and it goes on, right? So, but, you know, usually 11 and 18 these days is pretty much the two most popular. And like, let's say our horns, the right tool for the job, there is kind of a frequency kind of, you know, standard for where you use one over the other, right? So, you know, 18 gig is usually for shorter distances. You know, 11 gig would be for more of your longer lengths and then six gig is really for much longer lengths. But, you know, the spectrum is getting filled up, right? I mean, if you're in some, you know, downtown Dallas, Fort Worth and something like that, it's gonna be pretty hard to find some available channels or at least channels that are big enough for the type of throughput you wanna push. Again, bandwidth, right, is another big thing you have to understand just because an 18 gig or let's say an 80 gig, you know, can push this kind of bandwidth. You may not have that much spectrum available, right? And this is why you'll end up, you know, dealing with these, you know, frequency coordinators, like let's say Liz, right, at Intel Path and many other ones that are out there that you can give them the coordinates of your towers. I want from point A to point B, you know, I'm thinking 18 or 11 gig, whatever it is. And they can go through and kind of tell you, okay, you know, at this particular frequency, you know, we can get you an 80 megahertz channel, right? Maybe at this other frequency, I can get you 240s, right? So if, let's say the radio can do, you know, bonded channels and stuff, you can still kind of get that throughput. So there's really a lot of information. License isn't like the final answer because, you know, there comes a time where you may not be able to do it, you know? And also the size of the dishes are huge, right? You know, when you're getting licensed, you know, people are handling like four and six foot dishes at that point. So you really have to consider that. You may have a small tower, right? As a new Wisp, you don't understand. You see somebody post on Facebook, hey, you know, I did this, whatever frequency, license, backhaul, I'm getting X amount of throughput. You're like, this is great. That's what I want to do. And then you find out that, you know, hey, I got to do that with a six foot dish. My tower is not going to hold that, right? So, you know, really when it comes down to that stuff, the best thing is go talk to your backhaul provider, right? Or the people out there, talk to Aviat, talk to Cambium, talk to SAF, whoever it is, Mamosa, that make these kind of license backhauls, their professionals, let them help you kind of, you know, figure out what frequency will get you the throughput that you need. The nice thing about license links is it's pretty much almost a guaranteed link, right? So if you get the spectrum that you need, you know, you're going to get it. When you do on license, you have no idea until you put that link up how much throughput you're going to get. So that's really the nice thing about license backhauls. You want to sleep on the weekends, you know? It's good to have good backhauls that are, you know, 99.99 plus percent uptime and stuff like that. It's all worked out. The manufacturers will usually do the path calculation for you. You tell them how many nines you want and they'll figure out the, you know, rain fade and all the other stuff to tell you what size dishes you need. And then you can take that to a coordinator or some companies do it, you know, themselves in-house. So, I mean, there's a lot of options out there but license links is something that, you know, whispers definitely need to grow into, definitely. And it's funny, it used to be one of those things where, you know, it wasn't until you were huge or well dug in and, you know, you've been in business for years. I remember, you know, being five years, like, all right, I'm ready for some license backhauls. Whereas now it's like, well, you're hitting that pretty quickly. So, but yeah, everything you says 100% spot on. There's a lot of iterative steps that you go through in this design process. You know, okay, I've got a distance. Which radios go that far? Do my RF engineering specs come out? Am I getting the number of nines? I want four nines, five nines. I'm getting the modulation raise, I want. Okay, now I know I have to run these size dishes. Well, will it pass structural? Can I afford these dishes? You get an eight foot ultra HD dish, it's gonna cost more than the radio. So, those are just so many things to take into account. Can I get the channels? Oh, I need X-Pick 80s. Well, you can't get them. So, this is where, too, I come from a distribution background. I've got a lot of experience there. If you've got a good rep in the channel, then, you know, they can do all this for you. So, I helped a lot of the reps, as they were learning at places I've been. That can handle all this for you. Or you can basically say, look, here's point A to point B, I've got good, strong towers, so I can run up to a four foot or a six foot or whatever else. How do I make this happen? And they'll get the radios. And they'll help plan that. They can get you and handle all the coordination, whether it's with Liz or MicroNode or Concert or any of those, you know, to find the channels. Some do it direct, Ken and Aviott, and he's got a crew over there. And, you know, he does all that direct, and that works really well. So, I have a lot of conversations with him, cool cat. If it's a complicated case, Cambium's really good about getting their tech guys in. Some of these cases, I mean, generally in his designs, it's pretty straightforward. And some of them are gonna be crazy, especially when you start talking about these four plus O rigs and stuff like that. Yeah, two plus O. I've done a lot of two plus O's, you know? Yeah. It gets complicated because you have those complicated OMTs that you have to put multiple radio heads on and you could either aggregate them together or you could use them as failover. There's a lot of different configurations when it comes to that as well. So, it gets really complicated. But luckily, like you mentioned, Caleb, you know, talk to the actual radio manufacturer and they'll talk you through all those possible options and stuff like that on the license backhaul side. For sure, for sure. Do not go blindly into that. So, know that you gotta pay for a license and get all that done. So, we could talk about this for days. So, man, actually we could probably talk about all this for days, but at some point, folks are gonna get tired of listening to us. I got a little bit of belly rumble here, getting a little hungry for lunch. You're getting hungry? Well, I mean, we've been, yeah, not hungry yet, but I graded this iterative cycle about every couple of hours. So, it's not really that long of a spread. So, is it lunch? Who knows? Is it two? Who knows? But anyways, and in the back of my mind, the wheels have been turning, I've been thinking about this TitanFest menu and stuff. And now I'm like, ah, now what am I cooking tonight? What am I cooking this weekend? Yeah, somebody was mentioning yesterday. They're like, they sent me a DM and they're like, okay, just listen to me right here. Wagyu tamales. That's all he said. You know, I'm just like, okay. Yeah, I'm not gonna be rolling tamales for 50 plus people or something like that. So, it'd be a lot of tamales, a lot of tamales. If anyone was like, why aren't you hand-making the tortillas? Or like, all right, somewhere we do have to draw a line, but. But we are making a lot of the food ourselves. I mean, all the sides and dips and other stuff like that is all gonna be made with love. This can be made with love. So yeah, I've been playing a little practice. Now I've got like three pounds of brisket trimmings and my main grinder is broke. So I'm like, I'm like, if I can, well, I needed it as he used to upgrade if 100% on us. So, and now that I've got a timeline of meat sitting in the fridge, I'm like, this is a help grease this with the phone in its department. So, maybe pick up a grinder this weekend, maybe do a little bacon brisket grind. We'll see, we'll see, we'll see. Kind of excited. Good stuff, good stuff. Cool. All right, well, let's wrap this up, y'all. This has been fun. If you guys wanna get in touch with us, we are everywhere. You can find us at rfelements.com, our main website. Our YouTube channel, so much educational stuff, especially inside wireless. That track talks a lot about these basic RF fundamentals that we were talking about earlier. Great resource there. You can find us on Facebook. We are on the RF Elements main group. We're on RF Elements English, RF Elements Spanish. We are bouncing around on various, we're talking, I don't know, trolling people in various other places too. We're kind of all over. I don't troll, I don't troll. Nah, we actually, sorry, but yeah. Anyways, you can find us, shoot us an email, we're here. So, until we talk to you next time, guys, y'all stay horny out there. Stay horny, everybody. Bye.