MikroTik

1st - sorry for the other post of this question in the wireless forum section - but I am in a jam and need to quickly locate a solution.


900 MHz Metal 9HPn alternative solution needed - help

I've got a few customers that have zero line-of-site with some trees. I need a solution to make a wireless connection at 900 MHz or a lower frequency.

I have a few 900 MHz customers using the Mikrotik Metal 9HPn and they work OK. But I just now discovered the Mikrotik Metal 9HPn is discontinued.

So my question is what else works (licensed or non-licensed)?

I know nothing about LTE or anything operating below 900 MHz.
What solutions are available ?

Any help is much needed/wanted.

North Idaho Tom Jones

I think that the best "alternative" is RocketM900 if it's available yet.

Regards.

Well,
there is Cambium PMP 450i line but it is NOT budget friendly (their AP radio alone is something like 3k USD, CPE/SM radio is around 300 USD).

UBNT also has some older generation 900MHz radios but I never had oportunity to use them, they are cheaper than Cambium but still not even close to Mikrotik Metal.
Their LTU is still somewhere in alfa/beta stage and works only in 5GHz band, there are no plans for 900MHz version at the moment.

For that price difference I would contact all Mikrotik distributors I could find, there may be some Mikrotik Metals left in someone's stock.
https://mikrotik.com/buy

Regards,
M.

Ubiquiti 900 would be the alternative in the price range. How well it works depends on the area. The upside is that firmware updates can improve performance. Downside is that it's just not a great option for NLOS even if it's the only one in the price range. That's a general rule, there could be exceptions.

White space through Redline is 470-698Mhz I think. Can't vouch for that as we threw it in a big pile after months of problems. Think our issues were more due to the reseller than anything else.

Baicells has 3.65 LTE that supposedly works at 2 miles NLOS. We tried the low-powered version of that and were moderately pleased with results. The $2k AP is not a good NLOS alternative, though.

Both of these options are expensive.

I have Google alerts for these as we have several towers using them, but if they're available for sale, I've not seen any. If you find a stockpile beyond what you need somewhere, please contact me.

There are a few companies still making 900MHz cards but they don't sell directly to end users. They want a company to brand them.

Trying to see if I can get something going.

UBNT M900 has been discontinued. M900 didn't work as well for me as Xagyl did in spite of Xagyl being 802.11g and single chain.

9HPn seemed about as good as the Xagyl cards but it wasn't compatible with them (Xagyl and XR9 were compatible) so I was stuck,

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to deal with the 900MHz cards yet. They're dual chain, should be as good as Xagyl only 802.11n, head and shoulders above the UBNT hardware.

There needs to be something in between 2.4GHz and 900 MHz 450i for decent tree penetration.

Apparently is still available.



I see that the firmware is still maintained.



On my local distributor there are 20+ units available to buy.

Regards.

+1, I too would like to see the Mikrotik Metal 9HPn or a newer version brought back.

It is certainly a band gap needing to be filled.

And an excellent unique market opportunity for MikroTik!