 My name is Tossos with RF Elements and today I'll be taking you through technology or methods for fast sustainable wireless connections. So some of the things we'll talk about are different types of antennas like Omni versus Sector, Sector versus Horn, coverage planning, max gain versus balance gain, micropops and then knowing your antennas. The key here really is for sustainable wireless, you have to plan. Easy will get you nothing but trouble in the end, right? So if the solution is easy, you know, there is no just one channel, one thing. You really have to think about frequency reuse, how you're using it, where you're placing it, how far the signal is going. So a lot of things to think about. In a broadcast environment, an Omni might be good, right? But in networks, they really have no place. For us to be able to scale our networks the way they need to be, you can't have a single point of failure, right? So using an Omni to cover, and I've heard many many different reasons for using them, and some of them are feasible. I'm not saying not at all, but try and avoid it as much as possible because using an Omni is not really planning. All right, so basically what you want to do is, again, you want to plan. So you want to reduce your signal footprint as much as possible, right? So the most common reason for using an Omni is because you don't want to spend the money on multiple APs when you only have five or six customers. I mean, we understand that. We understand that there's a price associated to Sectorizing and multiple APs. But really where you have to look at is the spectrum efficiency and where your signal goes and where your signal comes from, right? So, you know, if you look at the cumulative coverage, if you just think about 360 degrees, you know, you can service those five customers with point-to-points, right, and conserve over 260 degrees of, you know, noise that you're putting out there, right? You know, noise is basically any signal that's traveling that's not intended for anybody, right? So it just adds to it. So, you know, doing some planning, starting with just point-to-points, you know, the CPEs are really expensive, inexpensive these days to do a point-to-point. You have about a 20 degree beam angle on most of the CPEs out there. So from a spectrum footprint, right, cumulatively, you could save 260 degrees of unintentional transmission by not using an Omni. So sector versus horn. Again, kind of like what Dennis said, right? So a horn antenna is a quite unique antenna and the differences are very important on a traditional sector versus a horn as a sector. And that's to side lobes, right? So, you know, Dennis put out some mapping, right? So we have to think about how we use channels and how we plan channel use, right? So if we look at a tower and just say, you know, do north is, you know, channel 56, right? Whatever it's going to be, that's either in a 90 or 120-degree sector. You know, it's facing north. So a tower that's south of that tower should also be using that same channel facing north, right? So they're not talking into the fronts of each other. When you really look at how most intended patterns look and you look at their side lobes, you'll see huge back radiation, right? So you think just because you have a 100 or 90-degree antenna, you think you're transmitting just north on that channel. Well, a lot is traveling south as well. So having antennas that have really small or non-existent side lobes and have very precise radiation angles allow you to truly plan because sectors, even though they're 45 degrees on most mainstream products, they're really transmitting in almost 360 degrees. Of course, the intensity is a lot lower in those non-intentional directions, but they're still there and they're very pronounced. So again, if we look at this, the no-side lobe theory, right? If we look at the towers on the left, again, you can see very complex overlay of signals. This would be for kind of 90-degree sectors with huge side lobes. But with no side lobes, you can plan frequency reuse a lot better. You know how far your signal is going to go. You know where it's not going to go because there's no side lobes to transmit in directions that you really don't want your signal to go to or you're not intending to send it there to begin with. In all antennas, if we look at sector antennas, if we look at point-to-point antennas or even CPE antennas, again, the side lobe radiation panels, patterns which, again, sorry, are missing in here, are very pronounced and they're very strong, actually, and they hear in a very high magnitude. So co-location interference, co-tower interference with the side lobes is very difficult to mitigate your plan when, again, you're thinking you're transmitting in only 45 degrees, but really you're transmitting in a much larger area. So the key here is just you choose the antenna technology that you want to use, but really truly understand how those antennas work because if you don't, then you won't be able to plan accordingly. You won't really know what the distances are capable out of side lobes to transmit and how they interact with your other towers. Coverage planning. So, again, this goes with the whole RF planning. I mean, you really need to, spectrum is very finite. We all know that. The noise floor is raising every day, right? So you really want to reduce the amount of unintended signal transmission as possible. You want to be able or try as hard as you can to make your coverage map for your towers, cover where your customers are, and try not to exceed those distances if you don't have to. Not to transmit into areas where there are no customers. Again, this is just going to add to the noise floor. It's unintentional. It serves no purpose. All it does is it works against you. So, you know, some planning with the proper types of antennas. And again, in this animation, you can see where the customers are in relation to this tower. And if you use smart antennas, then you can actually reduce the signal signature in areas where there aren't any. If you look again at what, you know, a symmetrical horn antenna can do as far as coverage because very precise radiation angles without side lobes, low to moderate gain on them as well so they don't hear as far as your traditional sectors do. If you look at the same coverage area with traditional sectors, you can see how much more noise they can receive and how much further the signal can transmit from your station. Another part of planning is utilizing, again, the proper antenna, not just the type of antenna but the gain of the antenna. So, we definitely see a shift in how people are deploying antennas or deploying towers. I mean, we're going to this kind of micro-pops world, right? We used to have, you know, 10 plus miles as the radius because you want to get as many people as potentially possible with the lowest, you know, equipment cost. And we're realizing with these higher modulation rates and these higher throughputs, you know, those longer distances just aren't possible, right? So, we're going to this kind of five to seven mile now kind of max. And it's actually getting smaller if you look like stuff from a MOSA. It's like one to two miles or maybe even less than that. But if we look at how we're using antennas and how we're using EIRP on our towers, we can see a drastic difference here. If we look at CPE antenna, right, if you're one to three miles out, what do you guys typically use for a CPE? As far as the antenna gain goes, you use probably something like a nano station or maybe a Power Beam 16, right? Is that pretty accurate for short-range clients? Yeah? Yeah. So, if you're one to three miles out, you use a CPE with the proper antenna gain for that length. If you have three to five miles out, you're using, again, like a Power Beam 300 or something like this, something that roughly has a 21 dB antenna because that's how far that signal has to go back. If you're five to seven miles out, again, people on average are using 25 dB CPE antennas. And then if you go 10 miles plus, you know, it gets pretty high so people are using rocket dishes and stuff like that. But if we look at how we're treating our sectors, right, if your coverage area is one to three miles, what kind of gain are you using on your sectors? On average, from the people I've talked to is about 20 dB, right? If you're three to five miles out is the maximum coverage area, what size gain are you using on your sectors? On average, it's 20 dB, you're not changing, right? Again, five to seven miles or 10 plus. So, everybody's using, even on close-end micro-pops, they're still using extremely high-gain sector antennas when it's not necessary. If we look at the EIRP limit, right, everybody knows it's 36, everybody here doesn't transmit more than 36, right? Same thing, if you're one to three miles out, why do you have the max possible transmit power on your radio and you're using the highest gain possible antenna for your sector, right? So, you know, the sector gain isn't just about output, you know, the sector gain is actually a fixed, received signal booster, basically, right? I mean, you can't change that. You can reduce the power, the output transmission of your radio, right, but your received gain is fixed. So, why, if you're having, you know, devices that are no more than three miles away from your tower, why are you giving your radio the ability to hear a tower 20 miles away? It just doesn't make sense, right? So, we just have to start getting into the mode of understanding how antennas work, how the relationship is in both directions for signal in and out, and again, use the appropriate gain, the appropriate size for the type of deployment set you're running through. Just like we're doing with CPEs today, you need to treat your APs the same way. Okay, so now we talk about, you know, some antenna specs. Again, we talk about knowing the antenna patterns, but this is how most antenna manufacturers suspect their antennas. Everybody is always looking for the maximum gain. You want that, if you've got a 21 dB sector, you're using it now, if somebody comes out with 22, that's just one dB better, so you push for it, right? But if you look at how the max gain versus balance gain of most mainstream sectors on both polarities, vertical and horizontal, you can see that they're very unbalanced. So, 21 dB might be the maximum gain at one specific frequency in vertical polarization and in horizontal, it's nothing like that, right? So, you're really not getting 21 dB. You're changing channels all the time. You're working around new interference stuff. So, really that gain is fluctuating around. You're much better off with a balanced gain, something that's flat across the board. So, when you change from the lower uni to the upper uni, you're getting the same type of antenna performance out of your antenna in both vertical and horizontal polarizations. Beam width, this is another huge thing. You know, the industry has changed. You know, negative 3 dB has always been the standard for measuring kind of antenna beam performance, right? And, you know, not so long ago, negative 6 got thrown in there, so everybody, you know, kind of maps to negative 6. Different types of antennas have different characteristics, especially when you look at negative 3, negative 6 and negative 12 dB signal intensities. So, you might buy a 90-degree sector that at negative 3 kind of gives you the gain and stuff that you want and you think that's where you're at. But at negative 6, it's 120 degrees, right? At negative 12, it's 180 degrees wide, right? So, you know, that might be 12 dB less than the max gain, but you still have basically a 8 dB antenna, right? That's capable of hearing 180 degrees, right? When you're looking at and expecting only 90 or less, right? So, really knowing what the different antenna patterns are and the different beam widths at these different signal level readings is really important. And some antennas, it's very sharp, right? You get the same thing pretty much across the board. And again, you can plan on it. You know exactly where your signal is gonna go and where you would receive signals from. And that's it. It definitely works, but it masks a bigger problem, really, what's happening, right? It's very difficult to take just an aftermarket shielding, not any particular one, and strap it to the back of a sector and expect for it to have repeatable effects from sector to sector. Yes, you're putting up a shield. Yes, you're getting better front to back isolation, some co-location problems, but what you're really not paying attention to or what you're really not seeing is how it's affecting the signal that's talking to your CPE, which is really most important, right? So, it already takes an antenna that has very complicated side lobes to begin with and complicates it even more, right? So, really it's affecting, again, your overall balance gain, your overall vertical to horizontal beam performance, right? Because what you want, when you buy a 90 degree sector or whatever it may be, you want vertical and horizontal to be 90 degrees and you want them to overlap. I know everybody here has seen problems when you get to the edge of your sector, right? You start seeing big chain mismatch errors. You see neg 60 on chain zero, neg 65 on chain one, and you wonder why that might happen, right? And that's because the beam patterns don't overlap correctly. So, what you do see with aftermarket shielding kits is you get good co-location because it's blocking a lot of that signal, but it's really having more of a potential negative effect on your CPE connections, which is really what you need to think about. And a properly built antenna doesn't require shielding. So, it is helping, I'm not saying it's not helping at all, but it's actually causing some potential other problems that may not be so prominent. If you look at the simulations, you create these vortices on the side, really complex side lobes that just totally mess up the balance of your vertical, horizontal polarization. It's very difficult to do. I mean, RF is very precise, very precise. You know, if you get that shield of damage and shipping, right, when it comes to you, slightly warped, slightly torqued, you know, you don't put it right where it's perfectly level with the antenna. It's gonna change what that front beam, which is again, the most important thing. So, it's very easy to be, you know, to see this kind of front end improvement in co-location, right, and not see the performance on the other end. Before we hop off on that real quick, I wanna add two things. One, Tossos did an ISP radio show about a month or two ago and he had a full slide deck and it had all the animations that unfortunately he didn't have here, including what shielding does and all that. It is probably one of the best presentations I've seen in a very long time, so I really highly recommend you take a look at that. The other comment, as far as the RF, or shielding, I don't know where it's at, all right, is I actually had an issue with me and my wife a while back and the issue was we were buying coffee and then we had an entire shelf of crack to go into the coffee. And one day I said, well, I just bought a good coffee and I don't have to add 20 things to it and those things are more expensive than the coffee. Yeah. So just think about that. Operation, how far apart would the sectors next to each other on each other? Yeah, so that depends on which kind of sector you're using. Some require more than others, right? You know, RF does really interesting things when it's really close to each other, you know, it's a magnetic kind of thing and you can have antennas warp other ones. So better built antennas can probably coexist a lot closer but space is still your friend, right? So, you know, I would say, you know, not everybody has the luxury of having so much space in their tower that they can space them out to the amount that's necessary. All I'll say is give it the most space that you can possibly give it and that's gonna give you the best performance that you would see with that antenna. Yeah. Yeah, let me, yeah. So there's interesting information about that as well. So, yes, you know, again, a properly built point-to-point antenna. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So shrouds, right? Shrouds is very important. If you look at the standard kind of beam form for a parabolic dish antenna and they're all the same pretty much. Some are bigger, some are smaller but the basic structure of the beam patterns are the same. And what you'll notice is you'll notice some very big side lobes go basically vertically up and vertically out the side. Shrouds are great at protecting against that. What you don't typically see is right off the main beam are two kind of nodules that shoot out. Well, those things are so narrow and so close to the main beam that they bypass your shroud, right? So everybody, again, you look at this main beam, you say, hey, I want a 10 degree or an eight degree. The tighter I can get that beam angle, the better isolation I can get. And that's slightly true, but it's not because those other beams, if you look at the overall beam angle, most parabolic dish antennas are like 30 degrees, despite their 10 degree spec in that main beam. And because those other side lobes are so intense, they're really hearing a lot of noise and they bypass your shrouds. Shrouds can't stop those.