Improving the link by using a dish

Last Wednesday (1st Aug, 2012), Nekron and I upgraded my connection to Ingle Farm by swapping out the 8dB omni for a 19dB dish. This is a fairly mundane task and usually doesn't need blogging but the advantage and benefit of using a dish, even in a dish-omni scenario, really does improve the quality of the connection significantly.

My link has gone from a slightly flaky one (achieving -77 to -79 with a SNR of about 30dB but poor CCQ) to a fairly highly stable link (achieving -50 to -56 with an SNR of about 55dB). At this time the link is achieving 1 day registrations with the AP and CCQ, at least on the Rx, is a very acceptable 98-99% (Tx CCQ is just weird in N mode and seems a less reliable indication).

The most remarkable aspect of the link is that it does actually go through a couple trees. I made the remark that they have low density foliage but Nekron does not agree that this should matter. However I still reckon the trees have less attenuation than what we've previously encountered as they are not gum trees (not sure what they actually are) and there are just 1 or 2 trees that intrude on the signal path.