System Performance Values

Required Reliability %

This is an important variable in your coverage calculations. This percentage adds additional statistical loss based on distance and frequency to get to a more reliable link. For WISPs, the default value of 70% usually is a good number. Longer the link more statistical loss is added giving your more padding on your link. For point to point links, we would advise to turn this up to 90% to add a bit more statistical loss to further pad your link budget requirements.

The Strong Signal Margin is what TowerCoverage.com considers strong vs. weak signal. The Strong Signal Margin is the Rx above the minimum threshold. The default color values are: green is strong and red is weak signal. On your coverage map, the red areas will the the Rx Threshold to the Strong Signal Margin and the green areas will be your Strong Signal Margin and above.

For Example: You already set your Rx Threshold to -70. Now you set the Strong Signal Margin to 5 dB. On your coverage map (using the default color values) you will have red colored areas and green colored areas. The red areas will be between -70 and -65. The green areas will be anything considered strong, or greater than -65. Now, if you adjust the Strong Signal Margin to 10 dB, then red on the coverage map will show areas between -70 and -60 and green will be anything better than -60.

Opacity

This value determines how bold the colors of your coverage are. 50% will allow you to easily see feature of the map under the coverage.

Rendering Quality

Rendering Quality determine the pixelation of the coverage map. There are three options here for the Rendering Quality. Typically “High Resolution” is fine for most coverage maps, however, if you have lots of hills and trees you may want to get the maximum resolution out of the data sets provided. In areas outside of the USA, the high resolution map will return virtually the same results as the maximum as the resolution of the land cover and terrain data is lower than within the USA.

The rendering quality on a Multi Map is determined by the size of the area that map covers. The larger the area, the lower resolution it displays at.