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Resolved Question

Engenius panel antenna replacement?

Sep 7, 2011 12:01AM PDT

Greetings,

Discussion is locked

bwswede has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer
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Clarification Request
Antenna or AP
Sep 7, 2011 10:08PM PDT

Was hoping someone else recognized the equipment you linked so I delayed responding.

The engenius is a indoor access point not a antenna but it seems that you may actually have antenna attach to this since the terms you use related to direction antenna are correctly used.

If you have outdoor antenna attached to this you can pretty much use any AP that has the ability to have replicable antenna and has PoE (power over ethernet) Not 100% sure you need the PoE. The tricky part is there are 3 common types of connectors used on wireless antenna and a number of not so common ones. You can get converters. I will leave it to you to google this since you need to look at photos to learn the difference.

The key to making what you want work is to use outdoor directional antenna. This gets extremely complex since you get signal gain from the antenna but then signal loss from your cables. In many cases the cables that a normal person can afford will lose more signal that you gain with the antenna even at fairly short distances. The simplest solution to this is to buy AP rated for outdoor use and mount them directly to the antenna without any microwave cable. You would then connect them back using normal ethernet cable which does not have the signal loss issue.

Although this site sells mostly commercial grade stuff it is a good site to browse around on to see what is available. There are more consumer friendly models made by hawking technology but they have very limited options. http://www.wlanparts.com/

Best Answer

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Antenna or AP? I don't know the difference...
Sep 8, 2011 1:22AM PDT

Bill,

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outdoor AP
Sep 8, 2011 10:15PM PDT

Sorry was busy yesterday .

I suspect you have a outdoor AP. These are basically a AP built into the back of a outdoor antenna.

After looking at the link I posted I actually found other models of engenius maybe this is what you have.

http://www.wlanparts.com/category/wlan.access_points/

You will have to look at the signal patterns to see how wide a area they cover in the tech sheets. You may need to use more than one if you need to go different directions. The ones called bullet on this page are designed to connected directly to the backs of antenna. You can find just about any antenna you could ever want in the antenna tab if none of the one piece units meet your needs.

Used to be that people would put indoor access points in waterproof enclosures and hook them to the back of antenna to avoid the microwave cable but now the price is not too bad for commercial stuff that is waterproof.

You should be able to guess what you need from the tech documentation but actual design of radio networks is a very specialized field. My company has almost 100 positions open that requires a degree in RF engineering and they are hard to find.

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Thank you!
Sep 9, 2011 12:48AM PDT

I'll proceed as suggested.