Does having multiple RJ45 jacks degrade the Internet signal a lot?

[Chuck Banshee]

In hindsight, since that was 5 feet of drilling (most of it air, of course), between floors, conduit would have been a good idea.

That's good advice for next time!

[Char Jackson]

Hopefully, someone who's done it will weigh in before it's officially declared a good idea. I suppose you'd cap the top of the conduit to keep most of the water and some of the critters out, or use two 90 degree fittings so that the Ethernet cable enters the conduit going up, over, and then down the length of the pole. Or something like that.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Argh. I've never seen it done by running the cables through the mast, even with a tilt up mast derrangement.

Drivel: This isn't a tilt over mast, but is kinda cool for keeping the antennas from digging a hole in the ground when lowered.

However, running coax up the center of a monopole for cellular service is standard procedure. The differnce is that the monopole is MUCH larger than the suggested water pipe mast. This offers easier access, additional support points, and less of a mess. Monopoles do have their problems, as these links illustrate:

The problems with running wires down the center of a mast are not very obvious:

1. The top of the mast looked like a coax "fountain" with all the cables dripping out of the top in all directions. It was truely ugly.
2. There is no way to secure the cables except at the top of the mast. The entire weight of the coax is supported only at the top. I would have expected the cables to stretch slightly. Instead, the sharp turn made by the coax cables going out the top caused the center conductor to cold flow through the dielectric, eventually shorting the cable.
3. If the mast is tilt over, as is quite common, the cable out the bottom has to include a rather lenthy service loop. If you're going to secure it short pipe stub, you run the risk of cutting the cable if you lower the mast to the ground.

Bottom line: Lousy idea.

[Char Jackson]

We were talking about a vertical conduit, not the mast.

Single Ethernet cable in this case. When taken in context with the looks of the concrete base and the overall appearance of a water pipe mast, the level of beauty is not out of line.

Yes, there are ways to secure the cable but they haven't been discussed.

I haven't heard of any plans to tilt this mast.

You're probably right, even though each of your objections doesn't actually apply in this case.

[miso]

I really recommend the right angle N. It makes it far less likely to break the wifi adapter. Incidentally, ALfa has a similar device called the tube.

[Chuck Banshee]

Good point as the Bullet M2 is a cantilevered arm with all the force concentrated at the attachment point.

But, wouldn't a short N-female-to-N-male pigtail be even better (with the bullet tie-wrapped to the mast, for example)?

[Jeff Liebermann]

About the same as far as RF loss is concerned. Much worse if you consider water incursion. If you wrap the right angle connector, there will be no movement to break the waterproofing seal. However, with a pigtail, unless the M2 is properly secured to the panel antenna, it's gonna leak. If you're really careful to use a drip loop and plenty of slack, you might be able to secure the M2 to the mast, but I think the first time you move the mast, you're going to loose the seal.

Incidentally, my method of waterproofing is to mummify the connector using 1/2" or preferably 1" teflon pipe wrap. On top of that, apply a layer of 3M Scotch 33+ 7 mil electrical tape. All it does is hold the teflon tape in place. Spray with a thin coat of clear Krylon spray to make it UV proof.

[miso]

I had a temporary setup that got blown down by the wind. It was the one time I didn't use a pigtail. It smashed the Alfa 036H. The PCB has a bulge under the RPSMA connector. It also smells bad when powered up. I suspect it draws more than the allowed half an amp off the usb bus because the notebook was very unhappy booting up with the damaged unit attached.

I got the tube version. It is about $10 extra. No adapter required, i.e. it goes right to a N connector. [Like when did that become legal?] I use the elbow. I may mount the "tube" in a metal box just to make it more rugged. I find the tube version is slightly more sensitive than the 036H that Alfa sells. Not a big difference, but a step in the right direction.

It comes with a heavy usb cable of the "extension" flavor. I have a few real watertight feedthroughs I've got from junked NEMA boxes. I don't think the scheme alfa uses is really watertight on the USB side.

Anyway, a pigtail is probably more likely to fail than a right angle connector.

I don't suggest people purchase antennas with pigtails on them. That seems like a design destined to fail.

[miso]

Photomast looks real Rube Goldberg. Just how expensive is a news van with telescoping mast?

In the photomast wmv file, it looks like they get it tilted up just in time before a car go barreling by.

My recollection is there are military antennas where the mast is the coax, so to speak. That is, support and RF feed are one item.

In any outdoor design, there is the school of "weep hole", and the school of watertight. Some people claim sealed units really aren't sealed, so whatever water does get in will eventually do damage. Hence they come up with a weep hole. The other school of thought is to seal everything up like a drum.

I bought an old NEMA box, which in theory is sealed, but noticed they stuffed it with desiccant packs.

Back to CAT5, I notice Moto Canopy setups leave the data cable exposed.

Come to think of it, I've seen some satellite hookups where the coax is in the LNB(F) support arm.

[NotMe]

Marine boxes are sealed and do a good job. We'd add a block of camphor before we closed them up and over near 40 years of working off shore never had a box leak (save ones that were mechanically damaged)

[miso]

I suspect Jeff is closer to reality, though I don't doubt your boxes didn't leak. For electronics, just moisture in the air is enough. You would probably need a nitrogen purge and pressurization scheme for electronics. Some camera housings work that way.

Camphor fumes are to reduce rust. I don't know the chemistry behind this, so I don't know how effective this scheme is for electronics.

A weep hole doesn't keep out salt.

Fry's has the satellite F connectors. I'm not really impressed with the satellite coax they sell, though I use their patch cables for temporary setups.

Quad shielded coax has been at buzzword status for a while. Almost like drop forged. [Yeah, we dropped that wrench before shipping it to Harbor Freight.] Yeah, there are four shields. Not the greatest shields.....

[Jeff Liebermann]

Not nitrogen. Too expensive. Just dry air will work.

In a past life, I designed marine radios for Intech Inc. We learned quite a bit about water proofing. Much of it was learned the hard way. Most of my radios would work after the boards were soaked with a bucket of water. There's no magic there, just use low impedances for literally everything and fairly wide trace spacing. However, I had to also deal with vendor supplied SCADA hardware, which was full of dense PCB layout, high impedances, RF sensitive design, and other nightmares. Kinda like what you find in the typical consumer grade wireless router. The decision was made to not modify the design, but rather to protect the sensitive SCADA boards. I won't go into all the things that didn't work, but I will say that the only thing that worked every time was a pressurized box, vertically mounted boards (so that they drain) and dry air. To prevent condensation in case the dry air went away, there was a small heater to keep the temperature above the dew point. My idea of dry air was a bicycle pump with an air compressor dryer filter attached. Add a gauge, a desiccant cartridge, and the usual warning labels. If you think you can do better with other technology, you're welcome to try.

Dunno. Most of my stuff was aluminum. There are products that you can insert inside aluminum tubing (such as for hang gliders and antennas) that prevent internal corrosion. I don't know the chemistry offhand.

Actually, a weep hole has its place. If you can't pressurize with dry air, then you have to find a place for the water to escape. Water will eventually evaporate in temperate climates making a weep hole functional. However, puddling is very bad. That's why I mound the boards vertically (so they drain).

The absolute worst idea is somewhat sealed box, that's not pressurized. It works like a water pump. Water collects on the box seams. The sun comes up, heats up the box, causing some of the inside air to leak out. The sun goes down, the box cools off, and a partial vacuum is created inside the box. This sucks the water sitting on the seams into the box. The next day, the process is repeated. Eventually, there's quite a bit of water inside the box. It doesn't just sit on the bottom of the box. It evaporates when warm and condenses on the electronics. It's MUCH better if the water drain out the bottom after every cycle instead of being trapped inside.

I make my own CATV cables. The compression type of F connector is quite waterproof. I've also used it at 2.4Ghz. Works fine. You'll never notice the 50/75 ohm mismatch as the reflections are all lost in the high cable losses.

Quad shielded exists only because the FCC demanded that CATV leakage be very very very very low. The only thing that does that is quad shielded. If you have an ingress problem, use quad. Otherwise, double shielded (foil + braid) works just fine. My most irritating problem with RG6a/u is the unplated copper center conductor. It like to corrode, especially when the mating connector has tin plated contacts. I've been experimenting with electroless silver plating the copper, which seems to help.

Archived notes on corrosion by a real expert (not me).

Worth reading methinks.

[miso]

I suspect the old Beldin foil plus braid is better than made in China quad-shield. Yes, quad is more about leakage than "infiltration".

I didn't want to go into this because it gets complicated, but I buy dry air from scuba shops. You need your own tank. Air is cheap. Inspections are not. Tank, hose, regulator and the nozzle set me back $50. When I blow the dust of out something, I don't hit it with refrigerant, which is what canned air does.

The tax laws regarding buying compressed air are interesting in a bizarre way, not that it makes much of a difference in price. If they compress the air at the shop, that is a service, and it has one tax rule. If they get a big tank of compressed air and use it to fill your tank, it is stored inventory, and the tax rule is different.

I have no idea what it takes to keep nitrogen at home. I'd have to research where to buy it. The only nitrogen I ever used was bought by some corporation and it was the mad scientist liquid type. All that said, since nitrogen isn't being used in life support like scuba air, I think it would be relatively cheap.

NEMA with desiccant inside is used a lot, so some people think sealed is fine. I have no surveys to back this up, just personal observation with a very limited sample.

On some GPSs, the weep hole is visible. It has a membrane valve. A friend got this brilliant idea to seal up the weep hole. He took a trip in an airplane with the GPS and the keys got sucked down due to the pressure change. Sometimes when I go camping, I can't open the ammo cases because the pressure change has sucked them down. So yeah, sealed isn't all that good in some situations.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Ok, you opened this can of worms. What you want is *DRY* nitrogen. The stuff the dive shop sells is good enough. (I used to dive but gave it up after all my stuff got ripped off). Basically, truly dry nitrogen has to come from a cryogenic tank, which is expensive. The measure if dryness is the dew point, or the water content in ppm. Look for something like -70F N2 dew point or is what canned air does.

I have several air compressors. Well, not counting two that are out on semi-permanent loan, I have 4 air compressors. They're easy to rebuild. However, for when I was blowing out my dive stuff, I used a Gast oil less air brush compressor. It doesn't generate much volume or pressure, but it also doesn't spray oil into the mouth piece.

Yep. Desiccant will dry the air for a while. However, if you're pumping water into the case by alternately heating and cooling the case, it won't last very long. Desiccant works best on pressurized systems.

Incidentally, I still pressurize Heliax coax runs (when possible and except for the local ham repeaters). I recently discovered that one of my original installs was still pressurized after 20 years of neglect. When disassembled, there was no green slime and everything was shiny and new looking.

Chuckle.

Install a one way check valve? I use a bicycle valve or plumbing air bleed valve fitting for filling. It could also be used to equalize the pressure before opening.

[miso]

I can see the desiccant being an issue if you don't service the box and change it out. I wonder if they are depending on the heat from the box to keep things dry inside.

I have a downconverters handy. [Learn by destruction stuff from ebay. ;-)] They just use a sealed case. Both have a black fuzzy thing inside, purpose unknown. I don't think it is a desiccant.

Pelican and similar cases have check valves. I just curse and yank really hard and the ammo cases open. It is is impressive on some of the cans with good seals.

I can't believe what they get for ammo cases these days. You would think with a decade of war we would be awash with cases. I was driving around Palmdale, spotted an Army surplus store, and decided to check it out. Small ammo boxes I got for $5 at the flea market were $30. I've bought real transit cases for that kind of money.

[Jeff Liebermann]

I don't think so. The box won't get hot enough to do anything useful. I think you have to get the desiccant rather hot before it will release the trapped water.

The black fuzzy stuff is a carbon microwave absorbing sheet, intended to absorb RF. The idea is to absorb rather than reflect as in a metal shield.

Locally, we have:

They don't even list ammo boxes on their web page. They have a few and yes, they're seriously overpriced. When Ft Ord closed, their supply of goodies dried up. I'm not sure why, but I'm seeing zero military surplus coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

[miso]

This black fuzzy thing is a small block of sorts. About the dimensions of a bluetooth dongle. If I get motivated I'll open one up again and send a photo.

[Chuck Banshee]

I wish to thank everyone for their heart-felt advice!

OVERALL DESIGN: As a summary for others coming after me and finding this thread, the right 'way' to wire the home network is to use a 'star' configuration where the cable from the outside antenna ultimately stops at the wall plate where you will be placing your Ethernet switch (which was incorporated into my home broadband router in my case).

From that central wall plate, you then connect additional cables radiating out to the various other desired locations, e.g., one cable to the game room, another cable to the upstairs bedroom, etc.

Lastly, you connect your Ethernet switch (in my case, it was my home broadband router) WAN side to the antenna cable, and its LAN side (typically four ports) to each of the other connections (e.g., game room, upstairs bedroom, kitchen, etc.).

CHOOSING CABLES: For outside buried use, you need gel-filled cable as normal 'outside' cable is expected to be hung in the air (selecting 500 feet of the wrong cable was a major mistake of mine). For plenum use, you need plenum cable. And for indoor use, almost any cable will work.

My mistake was two-fold. First, I bought from Home Despot (as Jeff tends to call it), which cost me more for outdoor cat5e than it would have for gell-filled outdoor cable. Second, I bought 500 feet of one type, assuming it would work for all types.

In hindsight, the better method (from a cost/functionality perspective) would have been to buy a short length of outside gell-filled cable for the outside runs, another short length of plenum-rated cable for any plenum runs (I didn't have any plenum runs), and another set of short cables for inside runs (which could have used any of the other cables).

CHOOSING 568-A or 568-B: There are two 'standards', 568A & 568B, which initially confused me in the beginning until I finally realized electrically, there is absolutely no difference between the two standards (why they even exist is beyond me).

The wiring is EXACTLY the same (electrons are colorblind). If you removed the outer colored covering on each of the copper wires in both A & B cables, you'd find there is absolutely no difference between the two types: the only difference is the color of the insulation. So, either cable will work in all cases!

The only rule to follow is to pick one of the two standards (I chose B) and then wire "both" ends of any one cable to "that" standard.

MAST MATERIAL: Again I made a major mistake on my mast material. Cost-wise it was a disaster compared to what it should have been! :(

What you 'want' is a single length of inexpensive galvanized steel tubing for the mast plus an equal sized length of tubing for the cable going down the mast; but the problem is that ten feet is as long as you can get at Home Despot for any tubing whatsoever. Putting three feet into the ground only leaves you with 7 feet at Home Despot lengths.

You 'can' buy multiple threaded metal conduit in various lengths up to ten feet at Home Depot, which is probably what I should have bought.

Instead, I purchased various lengths of 2 inch and 1.5 inch galvanized water pipe to bring my mast length to about 19 feet, of which only about

16 feet were sticking above the ground.

The advantage of the thicker water pipe was strength (over electrical conduit); but the huge disadvantage was cost & weight.

My cost for mast components alone was well over a hundred dollars (2-inch pipe, 2-to-1.5-inch reducer, 1.5-inch pipe, 1.5-inch-to-1-inch reducer, 1- inch pipe, pipe cap) at Home Despot plus a 2-inch-to-3-inch plastic conduit bushing from Ace Hardware Supply to hold the 2-inch mast portion into the 3.5" hole plus similar lengths of plastic conduit to fit down the sides for the cable to run inside.

The weight matters because I maintain my antenna simply by pulling the mast out of the ground and laying it flat to work on the antenna. It's doable; but it's heavy (I'm guessing over fifty pounds).

ANTENNA PARTICULARS: My 19 dBi flat-panel antenna & 600 mW Bullet M2 radio turned out to be overkill for what I needed. The WISP AP I chose is about a mile (or so) away - and with the Ubiquiti Bullet M2 set at maximum power, the signal strength was -65 dBm (about 400 picowatts). I'll likely need to lower the output power on the radio.

Aligning the antenna side-to-side turned out to be surprisingly trivial. I simply twisted the free-standing mast until the signal strength was best. It was 'that' easy. It took only an inch or so of twist to bring the signal down so the center point was very easily determined in less than a single minute.

Since the signal strength was almost too good, I didn't even bother to align the antenna vertically (i.e., in the up and down direction). I never knew alignment was this easy!

However: S far we haven't had high winds so I don't yet know if the heavy mast will act like a weather vane, twisting in the direction of the wind ... so I 'do' have a backup plan of bolting it down at the bottom with L-shaped galvanized steel legs to prevent twisting if needed.

I also have a backup plan of switching antennas from a flat plane to a wire mesh dish style, which will cut down on wind resistance. I guess I'll look for a 14 dBi wire mesh antenna (since I don't even need the 19 dBi I already have).

WALL PLATES: here are three different colors for wall plates. Bring a wall plate from the electrical outlets with you to match (I bought the 'wrong' almond color by not knowing about this).

ASSESSMENT:

In the end, I made a LOT of mistakes (most of which have been pointed out in this thread - that's how I knew I made 'em!) which I'd hope the next person doesn't make.

The WISP was perfectly willing to put in the entire setup for $400. In hind sight, it cost me just about that with materials and tools, so I didn't save a dime. Nor did I save in time (it took me a few days).

However, I learned a lot; I have some neat new tools; I buried the cable (whereas the WISP would have strung a line to the house in the air); I entered the home neatly (whereas the prior WISP drilled THREE holes trying to get inside the house, each an inch from the other!); I ended the run neatly at a wall plate (whereas the prior WISP left a dangling cable on the inside of the third drill hole); and the star network center was in the center of the house where I wanted it with no wires hanging on the walls (the prior WISP entered from the outside directly where the cable reached the house).

Given the cost was about the same for 'my' admittedly flawed installation versus the prior WISP's professional (but cost-cutting) installation ... I still suggest others do their own installation.

The only thing I'd do differently is that I'd read THIS thread and NOT make the same mistakes I made. The result will be a BETTER installation than that which my prior WISP did professionally - at about the same cost (i.e., you're just not going to save money over what the WISP charges!).

[Chuck Banshee]

Thanks for noticing.

Truth be stated, I am on a lot of forums and I post relatively often to these two NNTP newsgroups (using various nyms for privacy purposes, usually one per topic). I always try to give back as much or more than what is given to me to be a good USENET netizen.

People like you and Jeff have helped me MANY times - which I greatly appreciate. I hope that the record will help many others after us.

The one major flaw in that strategy is that the search engines for nntp news are vastly inferior to those of the web. For example, when I look up my old threads (which could be 15 years old and which were initially archived on dejanews), I often can't even find what I know exists (mostly using google group searches).

In fact, I often have to resort to web searches to find all my DIYs compiled with people's help. This works only because some forum sites tend to include nntp news 'as if' they were people posting directly to their sites (probably to increase their perceived user counts).

Anyway, this thread will be useful to others - as long as they can find it in the future! (Including me the next time I need to wire up the house!)

I've been doing daily speedtest.net reports.

The speeds initially were almost twice what I was paying for as shown here: 36ms ping, 3.82 Mbps download, 2.72 Mbps upload

However, my WISP has since dropped them down greatly due to what he called 'traffic shaping' & what I call throttling because I'm only paying the $50 for 2 Mbps he's offering as his base plan.

He's actually throttled me to LESS than 2 Mbps ... so I have to document that and let him know so he can 'reshape' the traffic shaping.

Is it typical for people to have to ask the WISP to reshape the throttling?

No. As Jeff noted already, we rarely get electrical storms out here in the Santa Cruz mountains. It even makes the news when there is lighting ... with people reporting "I saw a lighting bolt in Soda Springs" or "We even heard lightning over in Scotts Valley", etc.

Now, if I had lived in Florida ...

[miso]

For whatever reason, the flats of the south bay seems to get all the electrical storm activity. The bay area itself tends to have few lightning storms, and like I said, most are in the flats of San Jose. Not that this makes any sense to me. Everywhere else I've been, the mountains get hit.

If the WISP hired Jeff, I would have let them do it. Often professional installation is done by people who can't get real jobs. For fun, go into youtube and search for bad cable installation.

Regarding conduit versus galvanized pipe, you did the right thing. Conduit is meant to be bent. Note there was some guy on craigslist that was trying to sell a 20ft long 3 inch galvanized pipe for months. It was gone by the time I saw your post.

It had occurred to me that maybe a metal flange and anchor bolts might have been better than filling the hole. However I couldn't find any really wide flanges on the internet for moderate sized pipe. You've probably seen galvanized pipe used for railings and such, but nothing as heavy duty as you are trying to do. Also, any time you can get away without using guy wires is a good thing.

I don't think those antennas with reflectors wear particularly well. I'd stick with what you have. I've done much longer distances with a 16dB panel, and just to a wifi router in a house. Point to point is way easier.

While I've intercepted WISP feeds out in the boonies (encrypted of course...drat), I've never inquired how they are set up. Does the WISP provider have a high gain omni at a central site, or do they put in a directional antenna for each customer?