We have many of links were we have swapped out old R5h cards with R52nh's. Is there a benefit to upgrading these links to 1x1 802.11n versus keeping the old 802.11a settings? What are your thoughts?

-eric

You can push a little more data through 802.11n 1x1 without going to 40MHz. If all that is required of you is changing the setting, give it a try and let us know how it turned out.

My ptp links are still A, a few have N hardware on one side. My 5GHz N access point still tends to have the clients connect at A speeds, but that AP has a few quirks.

We are normally using wnc cm9 wireless cards and when changing to r52hn link quality goes down. No benefit at all.
Speed increase is almost nothing, and possibly you will have more problems with stability.
If you want to use 802.11n use it with 40MHz channel - this works better then 40MHz in 802.11a, or use multiple chain setup - thats great.
1x1 isn´t good and your investment to new wireless cards wont pay off.

That´s my experience.

802.11a with NV2 = ~45mbps hdx
802.11n 1x1 NV2 = ~ 52 mbps hdx (20mhz)

I've read somewhere in this forum something about that R52Hn cards have 2 amplifiers, each one connected to one MMCX, so the R52Hn is a 2 x 18 db card.
If you use only one MMCX, you have a 18 db radio. That could be the reason, Matess.

When I replaced the R52Hn with XR5 cards in a sector antenna, I got about 8 db better signal (average) in the clients.
In theory, it should have been approximately 5 dB, which is the difference between the declared power of the cards.

Kind regards.

Back to the topic. Anyone else had any luck running 802.11n 1x1 versus plain 802.11a for point-to-point links? We are in a heavy lightning area; so we generally change out older blown cards (r5h, xr5, etc) to r52nh cards. I know that using dual pol antenna's and running 2x2 would be a huge increase; but most of our point-to-points are single polarity (with the exception of our high traffic backbone links; these are 2x2 802.11n).

Eric

you can also try to use this card if you want 1x1 802.11n:
http://routerboard.com/R5SHPn

I've read somewhere in this forum something about that R52Hn cards have 2 amplifiers, each one connected to one MMCX, so the R52Hn is a 2 x 18 db card.
If you use only one MMCX, you have a 18 db radio. That could be the reason, Matess.

When I replaced the R52Hn with XR5 cards in a sector antenna, I got about 8 db better signal (average) in the clients.
In theory, it should have been approximately 5 dB, which is the difference between the declared power of the cards.

Kind regards.

wnc cm9 has only 13dBm
http://support.hacom.net/pub/manuals/CM9.pdf
and if you have 30dBm EIRP limit, then card power for PtP links isn´t big deal.
I was talking about link quality (means CCQ), not signal strength.