 Thank you everybody for coming. My name is Tossos, I'm with RF Allments North America, and today we're going to be talking about how we're redefining sector antenna performance, and we're very happy to have with us here Rick from SOS Communications in Texas, and Scott Stase from BlueSpan Wireless in Arizona. So they're among our testing group for these antennas. So first we're going to start by talking about our symmetrical horn antennas, and these antennas are very unique. They have many unique qualities, most of it is in the beam form that they put out, right? So it's symmetrical in elevation as well as in the horizontal and vertical cuts, so it's the same width as it is tall. The other benefits compared to traditional sectors is also it's beam pattern comparison for its vertical horizontal compared to the traditional sectors which have large side lobes, and as the frequency or as you change channels throughout the frequency spectrum you actually change the size of that beam. It could get a little bit wider, a little bit narrower, a little bit fatter, a little bit shorter, so your CPE placement isn't able to really move, right? So it gets affected greatly by this shift in the RF pattern that comes out of antennas. So again we talked about the frequency constant beam, so you can see in this animation as we're changing from 5.4 up to 6.1 gigahertz the RF pattern really isn't changing, it's staying the same, so you can be ensured that once you have a customer connected, not only is it in main lobe connectivity, but it's not going to shift its signal strength as you change channels. The other really huge benefit is that these antennas have no side lobes, right? So if you look at the animation on your right you'll see our 30 degree horn antenna. You can see it's a very high concentration of energy focused throughout the beam and it's very uniform. On the other side is a traditional sector. This is a very popular 19 dB, 120 degree sector, and not only can you see huge side lobes, but there's a lot of back radiation that's coming out of the sector, and you can see that the form, the beam form is not as uniform as our horn antennas. Now our antennas come in many different shapes and sizes or different sizes as far as beam width goes. We make everything from 30 degree up to 90 degree, so what this gives you is very unique scalability. So you now for the first time have the ability to design your tower based on where your customers are, right? If you have customers that are in a high density close into the tower, there's no need to put up a really high gain sector and propagate your signal way past those customers to create noise for your other tower or even your competitors tower, right? So you can actually design the placement of your beams to where your customers are to give you very unique coverage patterns. So again, there's a difference in range between symmetrical horn antennas and traditional sector antennas, and here you can see some of the plots of our different antennas from 90 degree here has a kind of effective range of about 2.6 to 3 miles and to our highest gain 30 degree sector, which you see here, which has an effective range of about six and a half to seven miles. So this is one of the, if you want to call it limitations of our antennas, but it truly isn't because again, it just works in a different way and it's not the only antenna that you should have on your towers and we'll talk about both of those. All of these horn antennas are cross platform compatible with the majority of ubiquity, radios, micro tech, router boards, and the Cambion EPMP 1000 series. So one antenna allows you to connect all these different devices to it really easy to maintain and install. So we're going to go to Rick here from SOS Communications and we're going to talk about his beta test site and now he's progressed on to deploying new sites with these antennas in Texas. So here was the initial test site of one of the towers and Rick will kind of give you a little background about it. This tower that we have right here is one of our highly concentrated areas and several areas off of my east and south sectors. I had subdivisions coming in and it was really getting built up and 490 degree sectors originally on the tower and we had real high customers on each of the APs and we were having issues with it and we had to come up with a solution to perform better for our customers and be able to add more because we were getting more and more. So we put three 30 degree sectors up and gave us 90, that gave us three extra radios to add new customers on move offload some customers on it. We were able to balance out our connection rate. I have people that are hooked up to to them at 8.8 miles incredible DBI gain. My air max quality and capacity went up and my noise floor went up. If you look on this scale right here the one on the left was before I moved them to the 30 degree sector and the one on the right is the 30 degree sector and you can see that there was a major difference in my air max quality and capacity and I did that on nearly every customer that I moved and the performance and the throughput improved and we were so impressed with it that we decided to build another tower out of it with using the horns and the RF elements and in a highly concentrated little town near us and so far it's been a great success. Thanks any questions about this one particularly? We'll do Q&A at the end as well so if you have questions or if you have any now we'll take them. Can you go back to that range? Absolutely so it could be a little confusing to see but the red ones here are horn antennas right so this is our 30 degree 18 dB sector and with a typical like a nano beam 21 right or nano bridge 21 CPE you can do about 6.6 miles. 21 dB on the customer side but if we're higher on that we can go. Exactly he's using nano beam 25s and the power bridge 400s and he's getting over 8 miles on them. Okay okay so now we're going to move on to our carrier class sector which it's footprint or it's size is more of the traditional sector that you're used to but again we're redefining this type of legacy form factor we're in our own style so our sector carrier class is designed for a cluster deployment it has built-in back shielding right so there's no need to spend the same amount of money on antenna on an armor kit to try and protect your antenna or give you the the false sense of protection right so these antennas have excellent vertical and horizontal performance and that the beams overlap identically it's very lightweight and very well built most of you have been and seen the quality of our antennas so here's the balanced beams that we're talking about so if you look at our antenna on the left hand side you can see that our vertical beam and horizontal beam have exactly the same overlaying coverage if you look at a traditional sector it might be spec that 120 degrees and you actually might get 120 degrees in the horizontal but you'd actually get about 90 or 100 or 110 on the vertical and I guess if you're within that 110 you might say that that's okay but that's usually not the case right the the customers that are on those edges get huge mismatches and chain zero chain one signal strengths and therefore the modulations fall off as well so it's a huge performance hitter when it's not a balanced beam so here we have the animation of again what the back shields do so you can see with no back shield here there's radiation to the back of antenna which cause issues with interference and with the back shields on right you you know bring that bring that all down here we'll show you some RF plots here so if you look at the antenna all the left again this is a typical 19 dB 120 degree sector one of the most popular ones on the market you can see that there's huge radiation off of the the back of the antenna as well as you have a lot of a radiation on the side this is the same antenna with an armor kit put on it you can still see that there's back radiation but you're also creating these ripples on the side that's warping the signal and if you're if your cpe is coming in on that outer angle you're going to get packet loss and all sorts of other issues this is our antenna with the back shield built in you can see much less back radiation and again it's it's a more unified uniform and focused beam the other big key feature here is you can see traditional sectors run 130 to 150 dollars when you add an armor kit you're up to 200 and possibly 50 dollars for 130 dollars you get it all in one in our antenna so not only is it a price performance but it's also physical performance you don't have the wind loading you don't have the headache of trying to upgrade and do that stuff on your sectors after the fact so one skew one part solves your problems so from here we're going to go to scott from blue span wireless and he's going to talk about his deployment with the carrier class sectors his initial site was a brand new site there wasn't a swap you know one for the other but he really wanted to test how much better the performance is from his legacy stuff and he'll speak to that hi guys thanks and uh i appreciate him saying my deployment but it's actually our deployment we have a great team at my company greg here in the front row he was one of the integral parts of that so i may defer to him if we have some questions but what we did is we took a brand new site we've been building like crazy and in the past we use the ubiquity sectors and almost exclusively tried some other stuff didn't work too well but what we wanted to do is go okay typically we put up a site now let's put up a site completely with the carrier class antennas and we know kind of what we're going to expect because we're in the desert we've got a kind of a unique environment what we saw across the board is about a 15 to 20 percent increase the biggest thing that i think we found was and and all of us have experienced this when you when you put a customer on this kind of on the edge of that sector you get that mismatch chain or it just doesn't work doesn't matter how you point it it's just not there that went literally away with this antenna these antennas are much much tighter in how they shoot the signal out there there are 100 degrees versus 120 key is obviously to have good frequency management but this is an antenna we built up on the northwest side of Tucson each one of those antennas on some standoffs another key advantage nor our farmer it's much lighter the wind load significantly less it took us a third of the time to deploy these antennas that it does it take an antenna that we have to build a our farmer kid around and everything else that's a real big advantage and you also talk in half the cost so for us when you look at it i i look at it in terms of the numbers you know my engineers look at it in terms of how well it works and performs but i look at it in terms of cost to deploy and it was a no-brainer absolutely no-brainer given what's on the market today there is no viable reason to choose anything else but this antenna right now so it's something you really want to take a strong look at it but at any rate we got out there and we saw about 15 to 20 improvement in our our signals our ccq went up our noise floor is perfect now comparatively this is another mountain we put him on if i think the video start playing here in a second uh you probably can't you may see the solar site there but i've got this mountain crowned with these sectors we painted them to match the natural terrain you're down if you're down at one of those houses you can't even tell we're there here we go this is a small flyover with our drone but you can see that the the dishes for the back halls are right there on the edge there's a sector right there right there pretty well camouflage huh we're able to shoot from this mountain i put customers all day long at 12 miles great ccq neg neg low 60s and which sector is it the 17db or the 20db right that site there is probably the 20s 20s yeah yeah this site with the tower we did the next uh 17db uh sectors um that's looking west i'm sorry east into tucson right now and uh so obviously this mountain's got this little hill we've got kind of a nice vector uh view but uh what we're finding is uh we're able to light up this entire region with just those sectors and uh incredible signal levels so you know you really want to take a look at these things they're much tighter they're performing way better than the ubiquity sectors and at the price point i just it's hard to say no i don't want to try them you know um what else i think that's about covers does anybody got any questions they can stand up on your tower so conventional wisdom right you know even with the even with the rf armor and and actually go back to that slide that shows the rf armor versus right here so this is a perfect example why if you look at the this is truth if you've used our farmer you know it's it's ish it's off armor ish what we found is we still needed the separation so just being old school that tower was our first deployment with this we wanted to make sure that we had at least three feet of separation and so we built the the standouts for it looking back we probably don't need it because this this antenna is much cleaner much cleaner but that was why we put it in there my my wisdom is this if you've got the space do it if you don't um you know i think you can put these just have you seen the the six gang clusters or eight uh you know you you can put these sectors i have no doubt that these sectors will perform better in that in those cluster arrays than the other sectors with our farmer however i'm just old school if you've got the room use it you know we found that no matter how you dice it if you get this much distance between a sector you just tend to have less issues you know radio waves or radio waves you're you're you're you're shooting a wave out there give it a little bit of breathing room and you get this sector is designed to help mitigate that but like you said if if you've got real state do it the problem is most people don't have the real estate a lot of people are co-located environments and the way we're looking at it is we're going to blend these sectors with the horns to really get what we want and we're we're very very very pleased with where we're going with this well that's what i did on the on the one that i built i i'm very limited on the space that i had and so i put the horns uh in the highly concentrated areas i use 90 degree sectors on there because they the the cluster of customers in that group or maybe the furthest one out two miles but then for my long range i used the the the class a and i actually had to put them back to back to each other one a little higher than the other one but i'm basically back to back and uh i have no issues with them none whatsoever and you get co-located with other providers yes and did you were you in a position to note it to see an improvement for me it was for you know did you have the the ubiquity sector and then you replace open arms on the second you see the improvement yeah did you see the slide yes yeah yeah that that's that's actually screenshot that was screenshots of i took i took a screenshot of that actual customer and that was the same radio night and day difference night and day difference i mean the ccq difference and i've got 40 or 50 of them that i've done and uh and moved in fact this new the new ap that are the new tower built that i had uh it was right next to another one and it was just overloaded and uh we've already increased uh we couldn't put nobody else on them because we just you know we just didn't have enough we couldn't do it there's no more room on the ap forum and uh we tried moving stuff around then we put these the new horns up and and i've already increased my clientele i can go back and call these customers back up that we had to turn down and say we can get you now and so it's been a month and we probably got 15 of them hooked back up to them yeah so it lets you increase your capacity because we all know that that magical limit of about 30 to 40 users on an ap depending on your plans well what happens when you can have three ap's instead of one so it's a lot more efficiency in use of your tower space and stuff so i think the the perfect mix is to take the carrier class with the horns and plan your tower around your customer base and what you've got is two different totally different types of antennas that help you achieve everything you want to achieve now whereas in the past we kind of just had to go put it up and hope for the best especially with those edges right you don't have that problem anymore so any other questions is that the same or similar sector that comes with the epnp 5 gigahertz so it it it looks the same it looks the same we actually manufactured uh back in the day the epnp based on their specs not our specs uh this antenna is totally redesigned internally it's it's our own specifications so it just looks similar on the outside but it performs way better have you done any testing with the ubiquity dc line yes yeah absolutely so i mean again these these antennas are kind of vendor neutral as far as platform as well so so yeah they've been used he uses net metals rick is using ubiquity rockets but they've been used with the the prism you know the ac ptp or ptmp radios and ac lights i just find that with ubiquity ac i've got to use a really big dish on the customer side uh to hit that 256 quam and just you know the improvements is they're better cross polarization so it's not yeah so it's not necessarily about the cross polarization we're noticing it's annoying exactly so we're noticing actually that the horn antennas are working really really well with the ubiquity ac stuff because of the noise isolation it's really the noise isolation that you need to get those modulation raised up yeah and as you can see in rick's case it wasn't an ac radio but you can see where the ccq and air max quality is extremely poor and just switching to the horn almost tripled that quality so yeah and i can i can vouch that wherever i put them my noise floor has just been phenomenal compared to to the standard that we were using before and uh it makes a lot of difference i also like to say that i'm also the installer guy the guy that our infrastructure climbs the towers and puts but always put the back halls and the stuff up and uh found it very easy to put three sectors four sectors up and carry it up with me on my back easier than it would have been with anything i mean in half the time i put three sectors up and and the time it would have taken to put one up with the the other way because they can all they they can all go in one spot and you can just it was it saved me a lot of time yeah that's actually kind of on on the lower side so typically what we're seeing we're seeing between you know three to four on the lower end and as high as a 10 db difference in in link budget with with the antennas yeah on the carrier class we saw i don't know what seven or eight db improvement average across the board so i mean when you're when you're shooting out of 10 mile length and you're still in the low 60s that that was i mean that's a that's a hell of an improvement what are you using on your cp side mostly micro tick we use qrt's the dynadishes things like that we're going to get ready to there's a new product coming out here from our opponents we'll probably move to that because it's an improvement over both of those we're very excited to put that out in the field so we have a very active forum now it's rftlab.com so we urge you to come join our community i mean if you as you start your experience in testing these things get on there if you have any uh you know requests or you know feature feedback i mean uh we're we're definitely wanting to listen to the the user group out there and and you know help build our future products as well you can follow us on our youtube page facebook linkedin twitter gmail a lot of ways to get in touch with us um you know again we thank you for coming out listening and you know we're we're available backup or a booth if you guys have follow-up questions