LHG60 is ok-ish but Ubiquiti's new offering puts it to shame with reports of 8km real world distances without dropping in moderate rainfall, and pushing far beyond that in clear weather

I'm frothing at the mouth to get my hands on them to use as backhaul links as it would solve a lot of our problems, 2km on the LHG60 just does not do well enough, most of our links fall in the 4-12km range well beyond what LHG60 could ever do reliably
We'd be happy to pay 2-3x as much for a MikroTik product that can get substantially more range

Ubiquiti's new offering

Based on the current 802.11ax situation, this basically means you'll need a wait a few more years before anything comparable comes on the horizon.

Mikrotik has been good on 60GHz in my opinion, but limited with european rules to use only 57-65,9GHz. This is now changing, so all they need is to give LHG60 and/or (preferably) nRay new chipset (or whatever needed) that can make use of 57-71GHz instead of 57-65,9. Hopefully this is not too complicated. A new PtP nRay with 8-10km range would be wonderful!

Mikrotik has been good on 60GHz in my opinion

They were an extremely mixed bag for us until we finally got some answers (which was like drawing blood from a stone)

It's not until we finally figured out we need to run through a specific process that we could actually rely on them. Out of the box they are both good and extremely bad at the same time
Good in that i've literally turned one 70 degrees to the side and still got >1gbit/s throughput, alignment seemed almost pointless and the dish seemed to run on magic, not even a 5ghz dish will sustain a link let alone perform amazingly whilst doing that
Yet we'd also have them drop out if somebody sneezed within a 500m radius and increased the air humidity by 0.000000000000000001%
Nothing made any sense with them.

We found we had to....
- Always manually set the frequency to 64800 (or the next one down if you have interference issues). The default of 'auto' will always pick 58ghz which is GARBAGE, its the shittiest frequency to use and will absolutely drop in even a slight humidity increase, never ever use it. Or use 66ghz (CLI only) for links longer than 1.5km
- Throw stock mount in the bin and use a SolidMount if doing any links over 300m, because stock garbage will always move when tightening anyway
- Manually set tx-sector to 36 to disable beamforming on both ends
- Ignore the stated claims of a 2 degree beamwidth, because its just wrong, it'll still link up when 10 degrees to the side or more
- Completely ignore all values presented to you like RSSI or estimated alignment to center, its just flat out wrong
- Set 1 or both radio's to mode=align
- Run a UDP bandwidth test
- Observe packet error rate and overall bandwidth throughput. Error rate should consistently be less than 10% but a few spikes is acceptable
- Align radio whilst watching bandwidth and error rate, ignore RSSI
- Lock down radio and potentially re-enable beamforming with tx-sector=auto command

Only after doing that would we have predictability...... sort of. It still operates partly on black magic because we have a site where we are using LHG 60G dishes everywhere (yes even the Access Point) that cover a 90 degree spread and it works perfectly fine, which we are consistently told is impossible. Yet we have had other sites constantly drop out despite perfect conditions and short ranges for no apparent reason

In any case, they overall are quite good and we will use them whenever ranges are about 2km or less because 5ghz is crowded. However we just need more range
TBH I don't care if the dish needs to be 5x bigger, we just need more range and it must be RELIABLE range where it doesn't drop out at approx 7km or more even in heavy rain (Siklu can manage this) because then we can upgrade the majority of our backhaul and completely eliminate interference. If its less than that, we're still better off using the latest 5ghz gear from Cambium or Ubiquiti

Most a reply to millenium7 above.

The problem with long range is that UI has taken effective possesion of the only 'ad based chip that can operate in channels 5-6 AND the only 'ad chip with +3dB output. All other vendors are stuck until a new chipset comes out. Siklu doesn't use 'ad or 'ay in their multihaul 60Ghz, it's a proprietary FPGA so they can do what they want for $4k/device.

This 'wacky' behavior from mikrotik is the main reason we're not going crazy about them. I don't see this at all on ubiquiti PTP gear. I do mostly UI PTP shots because they don't have PtMP and mikrotik's has so many quirks.

Higher channels would help, but the +3db output is not a solid argument
The dishes are already tiny, just make them bigger, much much bigger
I would install a 60ghz dish thats 1.5m across if it allowed for significantly improved range in the 6km+ region (reliably in rain, not just on-paper in space)

You can either have your chip put out more power, or you can increase your dish size. Net result is the same, though a larger dish is also more focused and requires more precision when aligning. I suppose that could be a valid reason to not make the dishes much bigger if they become so precise that even tiny wobbles from wind could knock the link out. However current MikroTik 60ghz dish is definitely not a precisely aligned device, it's got a relatively very large beam width as i've proven time and time again when installing them

Most a reply to millenium7 above.

The problem with long range is that UI has taken effective possesion of the only 'ad based chip that can operate in channels 5-6 AND the only 'ad chip with +3dB output.

What do you mean by "effective possession" ?

What do you mean by "effective possession" ?

Ubiquiti has some sort of deal with Procera which is the only producer of high powered 60Ghz radios supporting channels 5 and 6. They invested in Procera (and consequently sued them in ubiquiti fashion)

What do you mean by "effective possession" ?

Ubiquiti has some sort of deal with Procera which is the only producer of high powered 60Ghz radios supporting channels 5 and 6. They invested in Procera (and consequently sued them in ubiquiti fashion)

Peraso

Yep, don’t know why my phone autocorrects to that :/