Receiving Station

The Receiving Station is for your CPE radios. You need to determine what the values are for the typical receiving station that you use. What you choose to use for your client radio determines your coverage map area.

Client Average Antenna Height:

The average client height is the height that you would normally install a client antenna. This depends on your area. This value is used along with the terrain height to calculate if at the average client height, what signal should you expect to receive. If you place this at zero, then no additional height would be added to the terrain. We recommend that you place a modest to low value here, even if you have two story homes in your area, a height of 5 to 10 meters is conservative and would not show coverage where there is none. If you won't have much if any client height during installation, you can set this value to 0.

For example: If you operate in an area that has many two story homes, then a height of 20 feet may be very common for rooftop installations. However, if your area typically has single story dwellings, then a lower value may be preferred.

Client Average Antenna Gain:

Client Antenna Gain is the normal dBi of the antennas you use. If you are looking to create a map with the maximum coverage area you will need to enter your largest receiving radio’s values here. If you want to standardize based on the normal radio you would use, not the largest you can use, your coverage will be smaller. This is a technical decision on what you want your coverage map to show. Again, if you want the maximum coverage, then you would enter the largest value that you would actually use in the antenna gain field. For WISP operations, we would recommend to put the largest antenna that you allow your installers to install with to provide you the maximum coverage area.

For example: Say you have a scenario where your average client only needs a 15 dBi antenna, but also do installs with 24 dBi antennas. If you set the client antenna gain to 15 dBi your coverage map will not show areas that you could get with the 24 dBi antennas.

Rx Line Loss:

This is the average loss you have when you set up a client radio on your network. This field can be decimal values. For most situations, 0.5 is enough line loss unless your equipment is installed with significant amount of cable (Such as LMR) between the radio and the antenna. If this is the case, you will need to use the specifications of the cable to determine how much loss you have.