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Parrothead

Well, this afternoon, we had the first heavy rain since we arrived at the farm earlier this month. Even with the 9dB gain omnidirectional antenna, there was no, zero signal loss at the modem. Have a look at the :30 seconds video:

 

 

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Oz Jon

If the signal level was still usable throughout the heavy rain, then no problem.  That's what I would expect at 1.8GHz. 

Rain would have a greater effect if you were operating at at 5GHz though.

 

Did the signal recover as soon as the heavy rain stopped?

 

If so, the dip was caused only by rain attenuation. More antenna gain is the solution to that.

 

If it took a while (an hour or 2?) to recover after the rain stopped, then the dip may have been caused by reflection of some signal off the wet ground.

Once the ground dries out a bit, it's not such a good reflector.

If ground reflection was the problem, then a combination of higher gain antenna and antenna height optimisation is probably the simplest solution.

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Parrothead
16 hours ago, Oz Jon said:

If the signal level was still usable throughout the heavy rain, then no problem.  That's what I would expect at 1.8GHz. 

Rain would have a greater effect if you were operating at at 5GHz though.

 

:thumbsup: I agree. I had no trouble continuing to access the internet throughout the entire storm. While not the strongest monsoon rains common here, this one did end up pretty heavy.

 

16 hours ago, Oz Jon said:

Did the signal recover as soon as the heavy rain stopped?

 

No. I was showing that the signal did not drop whatsoever, during the entire rain. I noticed, after it had rained for a while, that the signal was still 4 bars. After I shot the video, the rain actually became heavier, still without any signal loss. The rain lasted about 30 to 45 minutes. I was still surprised, considering how strong of a rain it was.

 

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