Of the 30 or so ABO's I have up I have found 2 things. On one tower I have lots of noise and junk in the air. Those ABO's tend to have lots more problems with dropping out and needing rebooted. On another tower on the other side of town the noise is very low and the ABO's associated to it stay up better than Orinoco or YDI hardware.
For the crappy tower I have been able to nearly cure the rebooting problem by doing surgery on the ABO. If I open the ABO, cut the supplied cat5, recrip and then run any other solid core cat5 out of the box down to the powershot it works just fine. I have used the stock powersupply on all installs aside from 2 which are 300' and then I have used 18V as suggested but only on those 2. All other installs are under 100'. If I leave the supplied cat5 on at any length I have issues with the ABO needing to be power cycled. Not all of the ABO's have the problem of needing to be rebooted, but if I have a ABO freaking out it is the only thing I have found which cures the problem. I have yet to get any of the new ABO with the short pigtail of cat5 and waterproof connector so I can't comment on those. This leaves me with a question. Does the ABO draw more power in a noisy environment or does it just get to the point where it is so confused by the junk it is hearing that it blocks out all but a perfect signal with low noise? I have to say I found this because I did not want to worry about one of my first ABO installs having an extra point of failure where I had to add on additional cat5 to what was supplied. I was not sure that I had figured out the best way to keep the water out of the splice and felt more secure with opening the ABO and having one 90' run of cat5 with no breaks. I am getting around to redoing the cat5 on the installs where I did splice additional wire to get to the desired length. I have tested this theory by cutting the supplied cat5 down to 15' prior to doing the above described surgery. Even at the 15' mark the ABO had to be rebooted 15 times in 24 hours. That same A BO with the new cat5 has been up for 7 days with out an issue. Now that I have that said I must comment on the way some people have been posting lately on this list. SmartBridge has bent over backward to give all the features we have ask for without breaking the price tag off in our backsides. They also hosted a FREE seminar the day before WISPCON III where they explained what they were doing, what their plans for the future were and then spent most of the time just listening and taking notes. Each time I see someone post a bitch, moan of complaint about simple stuff like the change to the new cat5 pigtail instead of shipping 50' of less than high quality cat5 pre-installed I get just a bit more PO'ed. I don't recall all of the people who came to partake in the free information and doughnuts, but I know the room was not full and more of you could have made it. Then you could have provided your very own input, learned what they have planned and maybe you could have shaken hands with the guys that are making this happen. Since WISPCON III, I have called Nish twice to confirm some things prior to making mistakes on my own. This level of support for a product in our line of work is nearly unheard of. Maybe they did rush some things to market with a couple bugs, but it is only because we all pushed them to get the product out the door and to us ASAP. Tom The PART-15.ORG smartBridges Discussion List To Join: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (in the body type subscribe smartBridges <yournickname> To Remove: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (in the body type unsubscribe smartBridges) Archives: http://198.63.203.6
