Wireless Service Providers → Re: ARGH! Ubnt radios freezing!

I have a nanobridge M5 failing this morning at -29C.

The radio link is still good, but ping times are all over the place if they get through at all. I think the highest response was just over 4000 ms.

Rebooting fixed the problem but only for a few minutes. It has now warmed up a couple of degrees and it is returning to normal.

Now I just have to figure out what to replace the damn things with.

Just out of curiosity.... Do you have it set to 23db output power?

That's funny, I remember reading about lowering the power level for cold weather, but I couldn't remember to do it at the time.

I will try that and wait for the next cold day to test.

I set mine all to 20db and have never had the freezing issue.... Perhaps a more knowledgeable member can enlighten me on why the hell that would make a difference :P

Lutful has made a bit of a comeback and probably has the answer. ubnt told me to do that some time ago and it also worked for me. It was only radios exposed to the wind really for me. Although I'm far from being in the coldest Canadian region.

This is general info for all radios: higher amplifier power levels always have higher possibility of communication errors. Similarly oscillators running outside temperature specs may introduce errors in CPU/RAM and Ethernet operation.

These failure mechanisms start appearing (randomly) when IC internal temperature falls outside spec. Windchill just brings the internal temperature down more quickly.

In my case the radio link was still running. It was unable to return pings properly or pass data. It could have been the oscillator/clock, but then why should I expect that lowering the power level would help in that situation?

If you are sure that your IP network was fine, then it could have been the main oscillator (randomly) going out of spec and affecting multiple clocks on the PCB.As temperature goes down, power amplifier draws more current and becomes a bit more non-linear ... which causes a bit more bit errors. If you lower the PA dBm level, the situation always improves as long as the link margin is good.