I have mostly direct line of sight (LOS) to my WISP tower, except for one lone pine tree. Will that really effect my ability to connect?
Yes, absolutely. The short story is: One customers experience: With one tree in the way, a 200mW radio and a 24 dBi grid antenna, the signal strength was -80 dB. With the tree cut down, the signal strength improved to -65 dB. The tree caused 25 dB of loss. Why? Think PHYSICS. Look up Fresnel zones. Think of every leaf on your tree blowing in the wind, reflecting signals in 5000 different directions… • Why use a sectorized omni or sectorized antenna approach? What are the advantages over a single omni? There are many advantages to using this approach. The main disadvantage is cost. The benefits are: • Increased client capacity By utilizing one radio per sector, you can increase the number of connections made per area. So if you use a three-sector approach using channels 1,6, and 11 with three 802.11b access points (one per sector), you should triple the capacity for that coverage area since there will be fewer connections made per sector vs an omni. • Higher gain / better signal level
