Add more power

Almost all the advice I get from people is to add more power to better RF signals and performance. So over the years I have slowly migrated from a standard 802.11b radio card to a whopping 300 mW radio card. As the power increase I improved not only coverage but I also improved performance.

Low and behold. To improve performance I tried staying away from LMR-400 solution and built an out door unit. I can tell you the out door units have been very successful. The power out put has minimum lost and I get great performance.

The indoor units are a problem. I tried to upgrade radio cards but the radio loss from the large cables reduces signal performance. I have some LMR-400 over 75 feet long. The loss is significant.

So I did the next big thing to increase RF signals. I added an amplifier to my LMR-400 cable. The amplifier now sends a strong signal to the omni directional antenna. The loss is still significant but the improvement is very impressive.

The size of the amplifier is lower than the legal limit set; however, I can theoretically buy a larger amplifier because of the cable loss. I forgot to mention that the amplifier is located between the Mesh node radio card's pig tail and the LMR-400 cable connection.

I'm about to test is out shortly between to weak links. Stay tuned!