What conditions affect Ripwave Performance?

Tomohawk

Hi,
I got Ripwave 3 weeks ago and have been reading the posts about IBB. I'm just wondering what atmospheric conditions affect Ripwave performance? eg Heat, cold, rain, fog, flocks of birds etc. Can I expexect an improvement in signal strenght given any of these conditions...

Thanks
Roll on Summer...

carbsy

I heard that if a bird chirps within a 10mile radius that you can get spikes. :cool:

Oddjob

In my experience its if your Ripwave modem is turned off, it works 0% of the time. If it's turned on, it works 12% of the time.

Sponge Bob

If it is turned on 100% of the time in Galway it works 0% of the time

causal

Tomohawk wrote:

Hi,
I got Ripwave 3 weeks ago and have been reading the posts about IBB. I'm just wondering what atmospheric conditions affect Ripwave performance? eg Heat, cold, rain, fog, flocks of birds etc. Can I expexect an improvement in signal strenght given any of these conditions...

Think of it the other way around:
Ideally there would be a vacuum between the antennae.

Any 'matter' will hinder the signal to varying degrees.
Matter (depending on it's form) tends to either reflect, refract, diffract, abosrb, scatter etc. your signal.

(Assuming you pass the line of sight test) If the 'matter' between the antennae was fairly constant then it's no real problem.

The real trouble comes with rapid changes in the 'matter' - which can be caused by atmospheric and other conditions:
- thermobaric fluctuations (wind+temp),
- humidity (+ rain-sleet-snow-fog-mist)
- flocks of birds, swarms of locusts
- farmer joe lighting his fire

All of these could degrade your signal to the extent that there is packet loss.

hth,
causal

bigpaddy2004

At the frequency which ibb radios work at, snow is a BIG BIG PROBLEM. Stops it dead in it's tracks.

GreeBo

causal wrote:

(Assuming you pass the line of sight test) If the 'matter' between the antennae was fairly constant then it's no real problem.

err Ripwave is a NLOS service.
In fact, in my experience, its more of a NS...

antoinolachtnai

The big issue that I can see, provided you have the antenna close enough to line of site with the base station, will be what is known as the 'hidden node' problem. This is a technical problem that arises with radio networks. The long and the short of it is that if you have more than a certain critical amount of demand on a base station (i.e., users and bandwidth use) then the performance will go down dramatically. There are various ways of managing the hidden-node problem, but none of them is perfect.

Radio networks just aren't as scalable as wired networks. Sad but true.