 Once again, good morning to everyone who is joining us for this webinar. My name is Tom Arzolanski and I'm a product manager and marketing manager at RF Elements. And today we'll tell you about how to go about rejecting noise using horn antennas. So at RF Elements, our main goal is to help WISPs thrive, really, by enabling them to run stable and fast wireless networks through our noise rejection technology with near-zero loss radio connection. And the noise rejection is a stepping stone toward massive scalability and really stable wireless networks, provided by our wide range of horn antenna sectors. The number one challenge the WISPs are facing every day is the one of RF noise, especially in the unlicensed spectrum. And WISPs commonly see the spectral graphs with high to very high noise floor that prevents the wireless networks from optimal functioning and sometimes actually even to the point of giving up on the unlicensed spectrum and maybe even the business altogether. So the spectrum is limited and therefore should be preserved as one of the most valuable resources in unlicensed WISPs networks. And the main cause of the spectrum congestion is the sheer amount of wireless devices deployed. So the very advantage of the unlicensed frequency bands became one of its main downsides. On top of that, these devices are based on technology directly adopted from other industries, which is unfortunate simply because the patchery antennas are completely unsuitable for WISP unlicensed networks in vast majority of the use cases the WISPs are dealing with today. The main issue here are the antenna side logs, which are almost never mentioned when talking about antennas as such. People talk about the gain, the beam width, maybe front to back ratio, but not the side logs, which are the root cause of the problems with noise in unlicensed WISPs networks. Take an example of an Omni antenna. So it radiates equally in all directions in the azimuth plane and nothing in the vertical directions, which makes its radiation pattern into sort of a donut you can see. So Omnis are the least suitable antennas in unlicensed bands since they spread the signal everywhere and receive it from everywhere at the same time, the full 360 degree circle in the azimuth plane. So for vast majority of scenarios WISPs deal with is probably the worst antenna since it pollutes the spectrum in every direction and makes any network extremely sensitive to any noise sources in the area. The patchery antennas cover a sector of the whole azimuth circle. So a typical radiation pattern of a patchery looks like this. Nevertheless, their side lobes, despite being quite a bit smaller than the main lobe, still cause the problems with the noise, believe it or not. On top of that, the size of those side lobes and therefore the performance of the antenna has such change with frequency, which is extremely undesirable feature. The RF radio will see different spectrum, so you cannot reliably trust what you'll see, that you'll see the same performance when you switch the channel. And that's exactly what this variability with the changing frequency means. Now this makes the networks using the patchery sectors sort of like a house of cards. Even a smallest change can throw off the whole network of making your life as a WISP and business owner quite difficult. These antennas are used for point of born applications or as a CPE, but these also have many side lobes. And the physics of these antennas dictate, you cannot fully avoid these side lobes. So the result of a dish having side lobes is the same as with the patchery sectors. The side lobes collect and transmit the noise from unwanted directions, eventually showing up as a slow network, leaving you sort of scratching your head and wondering like where is my promised one gigabit of the throughput the radio manufacturer declares. The problem with the side lobes causing high noise levels in WISP networks multiplies with growing number of sectors. So the side lobes of the neighboring sectors interact with each other. And despite all devices on the tower might be your own, you see not even counting in the potential competition. Now the interference problems keep growing until you hit a limit where adding even one more sector or connecting one more customer can make the whole network dysfunctional. The same is valid for back holdings. Regardless if you use dish antennas or directional patch arrays, the side lobes these antennas have inevitably lead to consistent degradation of wireless network throughput and even more so in the case of unlicensed 5 gigahertz networks where your competitors use the same antennas. Using the antennas without side lobes and the beam width fitting to any particular covered scenario is the true solution to the problems of interference because when you do not collect the noise, you do not have to deal with it in the first place. And if you only cover the area necessary, you're doing the best thing you can for your customer's satisfaction. If you replace even just one patch array sector by a horn to try if it really works, if it's not just the marketing scam, you will see a significant change in performance. Not only the horn sectors will perform very well, but also the remaining patch array sectors will actually improve. And this is sort of counter-intuitive and sometimes confusing thing about horns. They provide better performance because of the lack of something. In this case, it's the side lobes. But you can go even further. So the biggest gains in the total network throughput and stability at the same time are visible when all the patch array sectors are replaced with horns. Having removed all the sources of noise on a tower, each sector can function very near the maximum throughput the radio can handle, regardless which brand of the radio is your favorite. So you can stop boring every day like, oh my god, let's not touch anything, let's just not move anything so that the network doesn't crash. And you can really switch to being like, wow, there's little to no interference and I can keep adding the customers no problem whatsoever. And this is a real possibility within your reach with horns. Replacing a dish antenna with a highly directional horn in high noise areas, the overall throughput will increase. And you'll introduce huge stability to your network. The modulation rates will not only be high, but consistently so. Which is very, very important, if not more important than the actual maximum speed. Because as humans, as a creature which evolved over tens of thousands of years, we really are sort of ingrained with enjoying the stability. We don't need the maximum throughput, of course, depending on what the customer is paying for. But still, the stability is extremely important in the WIS networks and providing the service in the form of internet connections. So horns-based point-to-point links are very stable. And that is how horns work, unlike the traditional directional patch arrays or dishes. But the real magic happens when you use only horns. So no side lobes equals to no noise and that equals to maximum performance. Sometimes WISPs who start using horns and are very happy with them, they sort of want to keep this to themselves. And don't tell anyone and keep an advantage over the competitors, keep their little secret. The fact is, though, if your competitors started using horns as well, it will actually be good for you as well. The less noise everyone generates, the better everybody is. Well, and if you wonder how densely the horns can be installed and still deliver on their promise, you have a clear answer here, seeing these images. The answer is many. Lots of sectors co-existing on one tower and with excellent and stable performance at the same time. Unbelievable, right? With horns, this is the daily reality. And these are pictures from our customers, really not our own. So these are not staged, these are not fancy renders from 3D softwares. These are real images from our customers. Horns are a toolset that allows you to respond and adjust your network to any situation optimally. On the left and right images you see six ultra horns, covering distant narrow sectors with 15 degrees beam width, covering one sector each. So in the middle, on the other hand, is a cluster of different beam width horns. So the versatility of scenarios you're able to cover with horns is unmatched. So you can already sort of have a sense why we have seven different symmetrical and three asymmetrical horns plus the high gain narrow beam width ultra horn. Their varying gain allows you to plan the network depending on the actual need. Every situation is asking for a specific tool. For dense customer base close to the site, a low gain horn should be used. If you have a group of customers that are clustered far away from the site, the ultra horn might be with its high gain and narrow beam width might be the right solution. And for any and every scenario in between, you have the rest of the horns to choose from to deliver your customer's quality service they can rely on and you don't have to constantly worry about. And if you wondered, well, but how do I plan the network with your horns? So on our webpage, you can access our link calculator. And this is a free tool where we have integrated all our antennas and also a vast majority of the most common CPE devices, the wisps use. And the point of this tool is to actually help you plan your networks really well. You can plan the coverage in a very granular style. You can adjust the down tilt and see how the coverage changes. And it helps you to figure out, for example, what the down tilt of the horns should be because that's a very common question people have. Because with the patch arrays, the down tilt is really more of a nuisance and it's really not a usable tool, let's say, because anything beyond a few degrees of the down tilt, the coverage of the patch arrays simply vanishes to nothing. But with horns, because of their symmetrical radiation pattern, the down tilt is your best friend. So in order to optimize it and figure out actually what antenna, which of the horns is suitable for your customer base, wherever you're located, I warmly recommend the link calculator. So wisps commonly use the radio output power adjustment to control the coverage area. And this way also control the amount of noise transmitted to any neighboring links, which makes perfect sense and helps with the noise that a given link produces. But as you can see, decreasing the output power of the radio does nothing to the noise received by the access point from competitor's links. And this is an important point to understand. Adjusting the radio output power will only get you a limited improvement. To deal with the noise more efficiently, you need to adjust the reception area as well. By using an antenna with lower gain. Now doing that, the reception area shrinks, which mitigates the noise the access point sees. And this is another strength of the horns. We offer low gain horns as well as high gain horns. So you can really react to the surrounding interference situation adequately and optimize the performance of your network. So counter to the common thinking, lower gain of the access point can be a better solution in case of a scenario such as the one you can see on the slide. If you have the competitive stations in the vicinity of your coverage area, to decrease that received noise from those neighboring channels, you simply need to use a lower gain antenna. And this is really an idea that's sort of like heresy in the WESP industry. Because of course you always want a higher gain, right? You always want to go further and cover further distances. But in the sectorial coverage, you definitely want to be careful about this and really think about it, think it through. What is the gain of the access point you actually need to see? So far I talked about antennas having a lot of side lobes in case of patch arrays and having no side lobes in the case of horns, which is rather vague. So is there an antenna parameter that can give us a quantitative measure of the side lobes antennas have? Well indeed, it's beam efficiency. So beam efficiency is an antenna parameter that quantifies the side lobes. So it is the ratio of the main loop energy to the total energy an antenna radius. So maximum beam efficiency you can achieve is 100%. In which case, an antenna has literally zero side lobes, because 100% of the energy it radiates is in the main loop. The closer the beam efficiency gets to the zero, to zero percent, the more side lobes an antenna has. It's as simple as that. To give you a practical example, now here we see the radiation pattern of a generic parabolic dish. So its beam efficiency is 40%. The 40% of the power this antenna radius goes into the main loop. The remaining 60% of the energy goes everywhere else. And since everything outside the main loop is a side loop, it goes into the side lobes. And note that all the side lobes are highlighted in this sketch. So beam efficiency includes all the side lobes of an antenna, unlike front to back ratio or other side lobe metrics you maybe know. So beam efficiency is the ultimate side lobe measure. It is the most complete one, because it includes the whole 3D radiation pattern. And it's really based on the physical simulation of these antennas. So it really is the most complete measure of side lobes out there. Beam efficiency lets you compare antennas very easily. So the comparison of antennas in terms of side loop performance is extremely simple. The higher number wins. That's it. The ultra horn on the left has beam efficiency of 99%. So only 1% of the power it radiates is in the side lobes. An generic dish from the previous slide has beam efficiency of 40%. So the remaining 60% it radiates is in the side lobes. So 99% is clearly more than 40%. Therefore ultra horn is way better antenna in terms of noise suppression. Actually it's probably the best on the market. The vast majority of antennas used for sectorial coverage in waste networks are either patch arrays or horns. So the patch arrays have many frequency dependent side lobes. So which makes their beam efficiency values kind of dwindle around 60% depending on the manufacturing and the design quality. So the RF elements horns, both symmetrical and asymmetrical have a beam efficiency between 90 and 95%. And you can see other horns in this graph as well. And this is to highlight that it takes a considerable effort to design a horn such that its beam efficiency is high. The stable and zero side lobe performance is not a given as soon as you have a horn. But we put a lot of effort into designing and optimizing our antennas so their beam efficiency is really at least 90%. Similarly with the point-to-point antennas. So the patch arrays are again at the bottom of the beam efficiency performance because of their frequency dependent side lobes that collect and transmit the noise hurting any and every waste network. So the dishes are somewhat better. And generally the bigger the dish the better the beam efficiency gets if the antenna is carefully designed and well manufactured. And what is interesting here is the ultra horn. So its beam efficiency is 99%. So over the whole bandwidth of operation and both polarizations the beam efficiency of ultra horn is practically perfect. Only 1% of the RF signal is in the side lobes. So if you ever wondered you know is ultra horn worth the extra cash compared to a dish for example you have a very clear answer here with 99% beam efficiency it's probably the best performing antenna on the market in terms of the noise suppression. To make it easy for you as our users we added beam efficiency of our antennas into all our data sheets. So we're a transparent manufacturer and want to provide our customers with the information that is important and relevant at the same time. And maybe the other manufacturers do not show beam efficiency of their antennas in their data sheets. But of course they all listen to you to customers very carefully so if you keep asking for it eventually they will start adding it as well because in the end it's good for you to know what the beam efficiency of an antenna you're looking at is so you can really know how it will perform in terms of noise suppression. So to sum it up the three rules of successful noise rejection are first use high beam efficiency antennas the higher the beam efficiency the less side loops the lower the noise floor and eventually higher network throughput second choose the right beam width and gain for the job the wide selection of horns and their beam widths makes it very easy to pick the right antenna for the job you're looking at delivering and third adjust the gain of the access point antenna to the scenario and the adjustment of the radio output power has only very limited benefits so make sure you're really looking to those low gain horns don't be afraid of it we have many reports you know despite that the horns smaller horns have smaller gain the improvement of the noise completely outperforms those few decibels of gain lost when you replace a sector with a horn I'd also like to invite you to join the RFELab.com and that's our discussion forum it's a classical discussion forum meaning that you can ask any kind of questions we have some topics there already for you know for your easy navigation we also announce all kinds of events we're either organizing or attending and we also put there the recordings of the webinars and other videos as well and eventually you can also search through the questions which some of your colleagues asked already before before asking one for yourself I'd also like to invite you to visit our YouTube channel so there you'll find the Wisp Traveler which is a playlist with a few short videos where we travel around the world to interview Wisp's like yourselves who already use horns so of course I can be talking all I want about how great the horns are and how they will really save your business and what not but eventually of course the testimonial from your peers is you know more reliable of course it totally makes sense because of course I have an interest in selling our stuff but the Wisp like yourselves there's plenty of them out there who already use their products so please check those videos and see for yourself how do horns work for them another playlist on our YouTube channel is called Insight Wireless and this one contains a lot of very very short snappy videos about all kinds of different topics from the world of RF engineering so where do you a veteran of the Wisp industry of RF engineering yourself or you might be just starting out your Wisp business regardless please check those videos they might be useful to either refresh or get understanding of the concepts you may have been unclear about until today so I would like to thank you for your attention and we have presence on all the major social media channels Facebook is probably the biggest one where we post everything and sometimes we also post on LinkedIn but definitely Facebook is the biggest one out there so once again I would thank you very much for your attention I hope that this webinar gave you some useful information