Life cycle on radio cards

My assumption of any electronic product is that they should last forever. With this in mind I have some statistics to share with you. Back 3 years ago when I started to create my wireless mesh I used Prism based PCI radio cards. And in fact I still used them today however; they are more MiniPCI with ether a PCI adapter. Nevertheless the radio cards that I once bought were all less than 100 mw. In today market 200-400 mw is more the standard. I expected that these radios with no moving parts would out last me but what I finding is that radio cards start to fade.

What I mean by fade is the radio cards do not seem to give off as much power as when I first installed them. My thinking is that they should until they burn out. Most of the cards I have should start to burn out.

What happens is the links start to falter and the units tend to go deaf. They became hard of hearing. What I try to do with the radio cards is to put more power through them by changing Wiana power control to something like 200 mw. They don’t actually give off that power but the cards seems to be running a little hotter. This is more my impression rather than fact. In addition the majority of these PCI cards are running in an outdoor environment. This two can cause problems.

The reason that I sharing this information with you is if you use a commercial MeshAP or router seems to be a shelf life to the radio cards. If anyone has more information on this subject please email at don@moskaluk.com