A Tower too far

[CBL]

I believe that if a tower is more than about 6km away, there is no chance of making a connection, even if you have some signal strength?
This is due to the time the signal takes to travel to / from the tower.

When this happens, what error message will one get ?

======================

I am using Proasms MySignal and picking up a weak signal of about 10% with a 2 or 3 dBm Signal-to-Noise ratio.

According to Nic Roets distance calculator at http://rational.co.za/MyWireless/calculate.html
one possible tower is about 7.6 km away, too far... but another is 2.4 km away which should be OK

 

[nocilah]

in theory you would see it but you would be unable to communicate with the tower because your modem woulf have insuffucient power to transmit uplink information...

myWireless 128, 64, 48, 16 - depends on its mood.

 

[bdt]

I have a *very reliably* working site in Honeydew that's 5.65km from Helderkruin- as measured with GPS (disclaimer- I'm using supplied data for the actual tower location but I know the site data is accurate). And my flat-out distance record of lock, logon and *USE* is 5.9km- almost due north from Helderkruin. In both cases there's LOS to the tower.

As to insufficient power- just use a bigger dish/grid!

 

[CBL]

Thanks for the replies, i keep getting error 678 "the remote computer did not respond" with the far away towers, even though signal strength is good.

Today i have succesfully connected to a tower that is closer to me using the famous pringles can!

Trouble is the far away tower (7.6km) actually has a stronger signal, probably because it's on high ground, and its difficult to get the modem to lock on to the near tower (2.4km) - its in a dip.

To make it worse, both towers are in the same general direction (in fact within 1 deg.)

 

[bdt]

CBL your latest lament should be easily beatable by flashing your modem to the latest firmware. I know from experience that this DOES Work, notably from doing MyWi tests at two different sites:
A: right by Doll House where the Brixton tower is right on the horizon and my modem on its own picks it up every time a coconut- but can't log on 'cos it's too far away. A 40cm dish *pointed AT that damn thing* picks up Killarney which is well within range-and (at a guess) within 5degrees of that direction too.
B: 600m from the Killarney tower on the roof of a block of flats, the Woodmead tower conquers all! Only it's WAY too far to use. On said latest firmware with the official dialer my modem gives up the ghost on Woodmead and locks on to Killarney instead.

It just takes doing it right and MyWi works like charm.
-bdt

 

[Brolloks]

It's not always the distance of the tower. Height of your receiving antenna seems IMO to make quite a difference.

MyWireless 128, Tower: 82, Signal: 13%, SNL: 6, ber: 42%, node: 3

*edit*
updated signature. It's not a typo, but it's the best I can get while I wait for my grid antenna. Distance to tower is 2.1km

 

[bdt]

There's no opinion about it, of course height helps. The higher your antenna the better off you are WRT Fresnel losses due to (at the very least) curvature of the earth obstruction ..not to mention anything else like those pesky buildings and trees that people insist on putting up willy-nilly all over the damn place.

Of course this has to be balanced out against the signal loss that those darn cables insist on bringing to the party- you just gotta love working with radio!
-bdt

 

[altros]

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