Backhaul

[sunwukong]

I live in a rural area in a deep valley 2600 ft asl bounded by high mountains (5000 ft asl to 6300 asl).

Nearest broadband is in a village to the south south east. 8.8 miles.
What setup would be recommended for this situation.

From a road in the village I can see the top of a nearby mt. 8.8 miles away.
From my house I can see the mountain top 1.8 miles away.
So the total distance should be within the capabilities of several of the Ubiquiti devices.
I was wondering If I put a passive reflector on the Mt. and shine signal up from the village and up from my house could I get a good link.
I have a growing collection of 10', 8', 5' 1.2 meter dishes. Seems everyone has two or three laying around that the wife wants gone!


[/img]file:///D:/myd/problem.jpg

[Dave-D]

I'd say the passive reflector idea is problematic.
They work best where there are many watts in
the signal, very narrow beam and low bandwidth.
A big reflector plate is also a big wind stop!

At the point the plate reflector would sit, the
useful energy in the beam is likely several feet
wide. So the amount of reflected energy is small.
And the bandwidth is 5--40MHz, not exactly low.

Those huge dishes will also require huge supports
if you have any wind at all. And you don't indicate
if you have feeds for the correct band. But I
guess if you can focus a tiny beamwidth,
you might get away with a reflector.

A solar-powered repeater would work fine. I
wonder if you'd be willing to pay for the setup.
For example, the power budget for two Bullet 5's
is about 200w-h/day. To cover two full days of
poor sunlight, you'd need a 35 a-h battery with
a solar array providing 15V at 3A in full sun,
assuming 8--10hr of sunlight per day.


Have fun, Dave

[sunwukong]

Thanks to WHT and DaveD for the feed back. I found one of WHT's references 161A. My intuitive guess was to use a metal frame that I found years ago with mesh stretched over it. My memory was that it was about 6' X 8' but when I pulled it out of the pile of junk I found it was only about 4' X 8'. Its about a 7.5 hour hike so I will want to have something light, portable as I will only have one chance to set it up right. I will use a laser pointer and a mirror made from a platter out of an old hard drive. Mount the laser on a stick, mount the mirror on the mesh. Line the mirror up with the laser and one target, bounce the laser off the mirror so the light from the laser hits the second target. Well its been raining so I will not be playing with all this today.