 Welcome to the RF Elements at licensed podcast. I am Caleb Nour and this is Tacos, AlexEU. What's going on, Tacos? Hey, what's happening, Caleb? Tacos, yeah, that's probably the second most popular nickname that I've had for people who can't pronounce my name. It's either Taco with a T or Paco with a P. So I like Taco. Taco works for me. I like Tacos, so why not? Tacos are awesome, sir. They are. And this was easier than trying to come up with Greek names. I think I was getting burnt out on that. So it's either that or pop them off of Lopelopolis. So we'll have to come up with a new bit at some point. OK, you do that, man. You do that. So what's our call to action as we start this podcast? Always, always. Make sure you like, listen, or subscribe to our YouTube channel or anywhere you download your current podcasts on Apple, Spotify, and Google. Cool, cool. Well, let's go ahead and get to the chase here and get into the heart of the conversation. So we've been having a lot of these chats with customers recently. Seems like there's been an uptick, for sure, I think. Because it's fall, starting to cool down, people are thinking about expansion in the warmer regions of the country. Definitely. So what I want to talk about today is growth and migration to horns. What for quists that their networks are growing or maybe they're a little horn curious or horny curious. And they're like, you know, I bought a couple. I tried it, but what do we do? And we see a lot of these entry questions pop up on Wistalk. We get emails and stuff like that. And we always like to hop in because once you figure out some of the nuances and stuff of how the horns work, how to deploy, and how to start deploying the horns in your network, it's relatively straightforward. But we always like to just jump in there, show people link calculator and stuff like that, and give us some tips and hints so they get started the easiest way possible. So I figured this was a good venue or format or whatever you want to call it to kind of continue that conversation today. Along with some other little hints and nuggets that we've picked up along the way. Yeah, without a doubt. Without a doubt, there are multiple ways of doing it. I mean, there's kind of your, really there's like almost two different methods, right? Obviously, you have the totally horny tower, which is nothing but horns. And that's typically your new build, whatever. You just know you're gonna use horns so you deck it out. But the most popular by far, even today with is how powerful or how popular a platform has become is the hybrid installation, right? Where you still have some sectors or some other type of antenna technology on your tower. And then you also have our horns working in conjunction with those patcheray sectors or whatever. I mean, I've seen some people build out towers using dish antennas cause they wanted something really narrow, right? So whatever it is, essentially the hybrid is, you know the legacy patcheray type stuff and horns or you just got the full straight out nothing but horns on the tower. So yeah, that hybrid approach where people sort of start backfilling in things like that I think has gotten, you know, it's really popular. And it's kind of funny, like sometimes this year, you know average Joe Whips getting started a few hundred subs and they're like, you know, hey, you know I'm getting a lot of congestion or the more customers I add, you know the quality is going down or I can see my overall sector performance is going down or hey, I'll put up a bunch of APs and now I'm creating my own noise. So they kind of go, okay, I see the noise I see they're my competitor or you know, a lot of times they're causing their own noise and they're like, well we know that RF elements helps with noise but we're not entirely sure how. So, you know, that's where a lot is introduction conversations come from. And they're like, well, how do I how do I start adding horns to my tower? So yeah, so I think typically when, you know we talk to a new customer who's kind of curious about the technology kind of understands what's going on they understand what they're seeing online as far as you know what our horns bring to the table is still, you know for a newcomer especially somebody who's new and green totally to the industry it's like, well, you know how do I make this work? How do I justify and how do I know? So I mean like a typical type first time thing is just like just buy a horn, right? So I usually tell customers find your most overloaded tower, right? Whatever it is or your most overloaded sector, let's say or the one that's underperforming in some way whether it's due to noise or you just have too many customers on it and just take like for example our 30 degree symmetrical horn just get a radio pointed down kind of the middle or out towards an angle like maybe there's a cluster of customers, you know on the edge of this one sector or something like that just point it out there take those customers off the sector load them on to the horn enabled radio and then you'll just see the night and day difference and that really helps a lot because it also now reduces the load on that current AP that was on the sector so the performance kind of goes up for that guy and then of course the ones that are on the horn get the great performance you see from our antennas with that radio system and therefore you kind of start to get the idea of how this works and how you can start splitting those wider antennas up into more narrow horns, you know? Yeah, it's always fun when people are like hey, I'm with these 10 customers over to this horn and the signal levels are about the same or maybe a little bit better but what I noticed were the SNRs jumped through the roof and now on my modulations I went from 4X, 6X just sort of these semi-muddy connections to now it's 8X, 8X and it's fantastic and how does it work? Is this magic? We're like no, it's not magic it's engineering, you know we're cutting out a lot of that self-generated noise from yourself on the same tower we've got out the side load noise and you know all those benefits of what horns give you versus the sloppy sector approach. Yeah, I mean there's really a lot more to the issues that you have when you have really wide sectors, right? Or sectors in general because we're talking again about patch rate technology versus horn antenna technology but as you move to the edge of the sector the gain starts to drop off that's normal even on our antennas that's your 3DB and 6DB drop off so the gain gets lower so typically the users that are on the edge of a sector have lower modulation rates than the ones that are kind of in the sweet spot towards the center-ish part of your antenna pattern but the other bigger problem is with patch rate antenna technology is that the vertical and horizontal beam patterns aren't perfectly matched, right? So you might have vertical polarity that's like let's say 80 degrees wide and your horizontal might be 100 degrees wide and they call that a 90 degree sector as an example. So it's in these outer regions and the outer parts of the coverage area for that particular antenna is where you get those chain mismatch errors, right? So this is another huge thing. So not only do you have lower gain which means probably lower signal and lower SNR but now you have chain mismatch on top of that so when you really put all those things together I mean it just drops your modulation rate way down to what it could be even if you have what you would consider a decent signal so the horns really correct all of that stuff because our beams are perfectly matched in vertical and horizontal polarity and the gain for both those polarities are the same no matter where you are in the beam. It drops off but vertical and horizontal gain at this point is the same regardless. So you get much better connections. Yeah, the frequency stability across the whole band as well is really beneficial. So and it's when that light clicks on they see those modulations jump so many people fixate on just signal levels because it's the first thing you see when you put up a link and it's the easiest one to look at but you're not gonna have great performance unless you keep those modulation rates across the board high. So that's always a fun one or when people take their first 90 and split it into 330s whether it's symmetrical or asymmetrical and they see the performance differences fantastic and we always tell people it can be overwhelming they're like well I don't wanna put up a whole array it's a lot of money and I gotta have a lot of radios a lot more cables and stuff that's totally fine. Sectors and horns can definitely live in the same place and there's one of the big benefits of our system is it is so flexible. So again maybe you've got a tower and 360 degrees coverage but maybe only the top 180 degrees is busy. There's just some scrub or rural areas behind. Then move your sectors over around a little bit you can throw your horns on the dense areas and just rock and roll with it for sure. Yeah that's a fantastic point and something that people often overlook because they really this industry the legacy history of this industry has gotten people to kind of look at their tower deployments and the standard geometries that these antenna manufacturers have put out three 120s, four 90s, six 60s and beyond and what our antennas bring because we have so many different beam angles available is the ability to go ahead and mix and match all those different beam angles. So why do you have to have all 30s? You don't have to have 12 30s you can have two 60s and six 30s. You can have three 90s and three 30s to make your 360s so you build the coverage where you have it. So just try and open up your mind a little bit and start thinking about outside of those standard geometries and realize this is why we gave the industry so many different beam profiles to choose from because again, like Caleb mentioned you might have the south facing side of your tower have nobody on it, right? So why would you put three 30s there and put over capacity when you really don't need it, right? So really picking the right horn for the job mixing matching those different beam angles to be where your customers actually are because you don't want to transmit or receive from directions where you don't have to. For sure, for sure. And then you gotta think about what your radio load is gonna be too, you know? I mean, you know, from, you ask one of our sales guys you know, they're like, oh, you, you know you would look, we would love to sell 12 by 30 across the whole band, right? And so with the radio manufacturers and everyone else but you know, it's not necessary in a lot of cases and you've gotta think about how many customers am I really gonna put on a particular sector and radio? So if you've got a 90 degree spread and you're never gonna have more than 10 folks on that cause there's nobody else there, then you know you don't need to split them up really heavily. But if you've got, I don't know, 60, 70 subs on a 90 degree sector, then yeah, split it in the 30 30s. If those subs are out further and you need the extended gain, maybe they're not maybe they're all really close. And then we use the symmetrical, you know 60s or whatever it may be. So we do get that question a lot. You're like, why are there so many horns? You know, it's tools on the toolbox approach and giving you the flexibility to deploy in the most efficient way possible. Yeah. And again, that's, I think that's probably, you know I would say like the number two issue when you first kind of jump into horns, right? So the first one is they're very precise. How do I aim them? They're worried about, you know the drop off is really steep on the edges which is how you get that noise isolation. So they kind of overthink like, oh if I'm two degrees off and then those patterns don't line up I'm gonna have a dead zone. It doesn't work like that, right? So RF continues to go, it just degrades as you go beyond that point. Ours just degrade faster and that's how you get that noise isolation. And, you know, it's important to again, you know understand that relationship and how that work and doing it for the first time is really how you learn, right? So once you do it, you'll get it, you know going beyond that point. The second one is, well how do I know which one is the right one? Because you have so many, you know? And again, there's so many different types of use cases and we see wisps use, you know these horns in different ways all the time. Like, you know, our low gain 90 degrees symmetrical horn is still like a champ for micro pops, right? But people don't think that, you know they still think they want all this gain and blah, blah, blah and you know, we see people kind of, you know go with the higher gain 90 and use a lot of down tilt to kind of dumben down that gain, right? At the horizon, it's like, well why bother, right? You should now, you know if it's gonna grow and your service area is gonna go out further than sure cause over time you can just tilt it up tilt it up, tilt it up to grow out your distance. So from that, you know, aspect it makes sense on using asymmetrical over symmetrical but for the most case if you're building like really high density you know, lots of co-located APs and some geographical area you know the 90 degree symmetrical horn is just fantastic for a mile or less on most radio platforms specifically 256 quam or below. For sure, man. Yeah, for sure. So now when we have a lot of these conversations we end up basically telling folks look, there's a few things you definitely need to understand before you start rolling. I mean, you can go buy a horn throw it up willy-nilly and if you've been doing this a little bit you're gonna figure it out but we provide tools and information to help you make this easier. So our good friend, Link Calculator. Link Calculator, yay! So there's a couple of things. We harp on this all the time, right? But the two or three main important things with the Link Calculator is one it gives you what your coverage area is gonna be for your desired MCS rates. So, you know, most people when they think about coverage area they're like, oh, 90 degrees and we'll put this 90 here and it goes on forever. And it does in theory but you know, after a while you just don't have any usable gain. So put in multi-CPE mode turn on MCS 987, pick your CPE your gain that you're using for most of your CPEs maybe you're using a high gain maybe you're using mid-gain or whatever it may be and look at what your coverage area is and it's really important that you understand where your edges are and it's important that you understand what your max usable range is for that given antenna. You know, maybe if it's really short you map it with symmetrical and it's fine. Maybe you're like, these signal levels aren't quite where they need to be. So let's, you know, go to maybe an asymmetrical or go to a smaller beam width antenna to get that increased gain. So that's really important. The second thing is important is down tilt. You know, people get hung up on down tilt a lot especially when you're coming from sectors to horns. Your sector antennas have a much narrower elevation cut. So you've got to be really careful and most of them have down tilt built into of electrical down tilt and stuff and people get a little hung up on that. You know, a lot of times with these horns their elevation cuts are a lot wider. So you don't have to be as sensitive but there are ways that you can use down tilt. You know, maybe you want to cut the noise down on the horizon, you can play with that or you're wanting to focus on a very tight area that's right by the tower. Then you play with the down tilt and our tools will show you what that coverage area looks like as you adjust to down tilt down. So that's really important. And it's important to look at what your modulation rates are for the client. Think about now and in the future, right? So if you're going with mid range clients but you're like, well, maybe I'm looking to move to high range clients and I can expand my cells or maybe I'm trying to reduce costs. I want to use smaller cells or I've got a lot of density or thinking for the future. You know, there's a bunch of really sexy radios coming up in the near future. Whether they're AX based, whether they're, you know, they're all going to be running these higher modulation rates more advanced timers and stuff. So now we've got to start thinking about what the density is now versus what it could be down the road. And if you have the opportunity to maybe deploy a little heavier, saying, hey, if I've got a client and bang up this tower and move these things around, well, let me plan for putting maybe a few more horns or splitting it. So I've got more flexibility with the smaller beam patterns and the higher gains and then utilizing the twist port architecture and moving to another radio is a simple, you know, click and twist. So it's so easy to do that. Our horns are agnostic to the radio tech behind it as frequency tune. So, you know, if you're, if you're going through the effort to move a bunch of stuff around then maybe plan for the future like that, plan for using these higher modulation radios and, you know, you pay a little bit more for the hardware, but if you look at what your costs are to move all this stuff around and downtime and everything else, you know, maybe pays for itself down the road. Yeah, I mean, I can't really say enough about the twist port ecosystem and how under understood, is that the right way to say it? Misunderstood maybe that it really is and the benefits that you get from our twist port ecosystem, right? So it's not just this really cool, simple way to connect and disconnect your radios from the antennas, but, you know, the ability to switch radio platforms, the ability to, you know, again, maintain your system, upgrade your system and do other things is really, really, really fantastic. It's a great thing. It gives you so much flexibility. And again, the standard that we've built, you know, between whether you're going from, you know, an ultra dish to an ultra horn to asymmetrical horn to symmetrical horn, as well as long as the antenna, you know, our antenna that you use is twist port enabled. That twist port adapter and radio you have will work with any of those things. So, you know, you can take what used to be, let's say a radio on a twist port that was now a low end access point and you don't need to throw that away. You could just put that on an ultra dish and turn it into a CPE or turn it into, you know, a mid range, mid speed backhaul for something, right? So it's really reusable. And again, just a lot of flexibility there, a lot of flexibility. You know, it's kind of funny, I had a question yesterday from one of our channel reps. And he was like, yeah, he was asking questions about one of the V2 models of something. And he was like, what are the differences? And, you know, where was the mount that it mainly changed? And we're going on about that. He was like, yeah, my customer said that he thought the twist port changed and y'all were changing around the twist port. So we're like, no, like the twist port is like the main like backbone as to what this whole system is because we want to thank for the future and give you that flexibility to deploy all sorts of radios, you know, down the road when they're ready for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So here's something that's not really related to us specifically, but I see people burn up all the time on this and really hurt themselves is not mapping where your clients are. So, well, and it's easy when you get started, man, like you've got so much going on. And you're like, well, I know this customer's on the sector, they pay their bills. That's all I need to know, right? But when you start talking about doing these migrations, you really need to know physically where they are. So let's say they're connected to a 90 degree sector and maybe they're on the edge and now you're moving to 260s or you're moving to 330s or wherever it may be. You need to know which sector that client is gonna connect to as you transition them. Or maybe that client is actually behind the sector. You have this sloppy sector with these sloppy backlobes and they're pretty close and your tech were just like saw an AP connected it, you know, whatever they don't know what's going on. You know, you might be connected to the back of that sector. And then when you go and swap it out, you have no more connection because we don't have backlobes on our antenna. So there's a lot of other benefits of mapping. There's a lot of ways you can do it. The simple way is just making KMZs in Google Earth. Just drop the client and be done with it. You've got flint planar dust mapping. A lot of your billing tools, and this is a conversation we had a while ago talking about billing tools, you know, a lot of these billing and CRM tools don't do just billing. You know, one of the important things that they do is the mapping feature and showing you which clients are connected to which sector and which tower. That's really important. We were working with a guy the other day that we were showing us all this. I'm like, this is really cool because you have all this information broken down at a granular level and it just gives you so many tools to work with as you grow. So for love of Pete, make sure you know where your CPEs are because it'll burn you if you don't. Oh, and I've had many, many, many conversations with wisps that went to horns and they're like, hey, there's just no connection. This is horrible, this stinks. And I'm like, look, I'm telling you, you're probably connected to the back of that antenna and now you got no connection. It's like, there's no way, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do a truck roll, find out like, yeah, they're on the backside. So it's really important. And in a good point, you bring up Caleb for newcomers who are trying horns for the first time and when they want to transition to this, really there are a few steps and things that you should really think about. You know, we talked about the whole planning thing. You know, think about your growth, where this tower is going to go in the future so you can pick the right horn for the job for the initial thing. But also, yeah, definitely knowing where your customers are before, because not even just the backside, right, but even the edge, because sector antennas are extremely sloppy and the bleed off is extremely low. Yeah, you could still be on the side of a 90 or a 60, but it really be at like 90 or 120 degrees out, right? So when you put up a horn in its place, it's definitely gonna drop off because going 30 degrees past its spec beam angle is a hard, hard, hard drop off there. So yeah, so it's not just, you know, is it as obvious as connecting to the back of a sector? It's not. It's also how far past that initial 90 and, you know, or whatever that antenna may be that you're connected to, because you can be far past that. Yeah, that's a lot of where, you know, that sort of dead reckoning. We're like, well, no, Jim Bob's connected to this one. Well, he's over there somewhere, right? Well, as you get more granular and more precise with our horns, these details really matter. So, yeah, this hybrid approach migration is really popular. And then of course, you've got the option of just basically building out a new tower and go all horns on a new tower. You know, that's a popular way. They're like, look, we have this conversation a lot. We've got these new builds coming up. We wanna try horns here in a Greenfield environment. What do we do? Now, it can be a little overwhelming. You know, a lot of the pictures we throw up are these collocation miracles or these really sexy pictures where you've got like 30 horns on a tower. I mean, it's super awesome, right? But they're like, I don't know about all this. So you don't have to start that way. So especially when we added the asymmetrical, the asymmetrical 90, right? That is definitely the easiest way to do a new Greenfield tower deployment with the least amount of expenditure. You're gonna get the ranges that are really good. You're gonna get those 90 degree coverage areas. So you've got your ABAB channel planning. You've got four radios. And then you can build as that thing grows and you add more and more people to you, then you can go in there later and split sectors or move sectors around or add another array of sectors or horns as you want. So it gives you a lot of flexibility. So don't think you have to go out there and put 30 Intimus on a tower. I mean, if you want to, we can. We'll definitely take your money. But you don't have to go that way. Or maybe you're just covering 180 degrees. Put two of them on. So it's a really straightforward approach and all the things that we said about link planner and the link calculator and all these things still apply. It just gives you a cleaner way to start. You definitely want to think too about what your power distribution looks like, your data distribution as these grow. Cause people run into that a lot. They're like, I'm gonna go from four radios to 12 or whatever it may be. And they're like, oh man, running all these cables up here really sucks. So those are some other sort of growth things that we talk about that's not really necessarily directly related to us, but it's in general. So things like knowing where your CPEs are, having a power plan, making sure that you've got enough power and you've got enough room in your cabinets and stuff like that. Those are definitely some important considerations that we see people run into all the time. Definitely, definitely. And I mean, you bring up a good point about how overwhelming it can seem for a lot of new customers who haven't used it. Cause like you said, they're so used to seeing these really high density deployments, 12, 24, 30 horns on a tower and they automatically think, now they're starting to see a lot of people using ultra horn for point to multi-point. So you'll see six ultra horns up there just splitting those 30s into 15s and stuff like that. So they make those kind of off-handed assumptions that I gotta put up a crap ton of these things. And it's really not the case, right? That's what you can build up to. So you don't have to like forklift your tower either, right? They think, well, I'm gonna have to take down all these sectors to put up horns. I'm gonna be down for two, three days and what if the climbers don't show up? I could be down for a week. What I do with my customers? And it doesn't work that way either, right? So, you know, you'll go ahead and you'll put your, you know, like as you're replacing a 90, let's just say to make the math easy, you put up, you know, your three thirties, you get your customers over onto those new thirties and you're talking a five-second switch over and then you decommission that 90 degree. The other really big thing is, of course, once you start seeing a lot of access points in a tower, you just start thinking a lot more channels. And yes, obviously the numbers do work that way, but the amount of channel reuse that you get with GPS sync in our horns helps bring that down. But the other big thing that most customers really don't understand is your channel size. I find wisps every day that are running much wider channels and they really need to. And the reason that they're running these wider channels is because obviously 20 megahertz is probably not enough. Let's just say, as the example, you have the towers either overloaded or you're selling packages that are really fast. So you need more speed. So they'll bump it up to a 40 megahertz channel, which makes perfect sense if you were efficiently using that 40 megahertz channel. And what we find very often is that going from 20 to 40 should double your speed, but it doesn't. Because again, the modulation rates are down. You have mixed clients that further far out and close in and all these other reasons why the radio underperforms to begin with. And what we find is a lot of customers, when they go from a sector to a horn, they're typically able to go from a 40 megahertz channel down to a 20 megahertz channel and deliver the same service that they were before because we're using that 20 megahertz efficiently. So in theory, taking down one antenna frees up two channels. So you get the channel reuse, you'll go from larger channel sizes down to more narrow channel sizes, which would give you and free up more spectrum. So the math works out, of course this is not 100% every time, but there are benefits to the horns that you really don't know until you use them because also the other thing that was say is a, well I look at my spectrum scan and I just see the whole spectrum across the board is all, you know, all taken. And again, that's because you're looking at your spectrum through the eyes of your sloppy antenna, right? So once you put a horn up there, you'll see again, you know, stuff that was unusable before becomes decent, let's say stuff that was decent is highly usable. You'll see gaps open up and other things that happen once you use an antenna that's extremely precise and has no side lobes like a horn antenna. So don't be scared about, you know, I don't have enough spectrum or you think you don't have enough spectrum, put up a horn, try it out and then you'll see for yourself what everybody else has been talking about. Yeah, that's definitely one of the things that when I started doing this and started working with customers and you know, we'd look and we're like, all right, here's my sector in a 40 mega channel but they're all sloppy and all your clients are poor modulation rays and then swap to a horn, everything's 8x or 10x or whatever it may be. And I'm like, hey, you can drop it down to 20 and you're still getting much better performance. So that is definitely the unhidden gem of these transitions that people don't always necessarily see. So. Definitely. I mean, we could talk about this and talk and talk and talk. This is a lot of what we do in our day-to-day lives, but you know. I think we got the main points. I think we got the main points out there for our listeners. Yeah, and we're always supposed to leave them one more. According to Hollywood or I don't know. I don't know who makes the rules. We break the rules. I don't know who cares. I don't care. What rules? Hey, if you guys want to continue to talk about this topic though, find us at Whisper Palooza. We will be there. It's right around the corner and this is a great opportunity to have these conversations, see the equipment and everything else. Find us too. We're super easy to find. We're on all the Facebook forums. We're on our RF Elements pages, Caleb at RF Elements.com, Toss us at RF Elements.com. Super easy to track down. We're more than happy to talk to you when you're in this learning phase or just in general. So that's about all I got, man. You got anything you're looking forward to or? No, just a weekend as usual. So that's about it for me. Yeah, it is 49 degrees last night and it's supposed to be upper 40s, low 50s all weekend, highs in the 70s and a sunny. So for North Carolina, this is amazing weather. So I'm getting all jumpy and everything else. Yeah. All right, man. Well, I think we're gonna call it a day. Awesome, man. Thanks everybody for listening. Until next time, stay horny. All right, stay horny, y'all.