With Cambium discontinuing the 450 SM we have only the 450b and the pricey 450i SM to choose from. With 450b high-gain we seem to lose around 2 dB of antenna gain compared to the old SM and a reflector dish. And we recently tried our first 450m AP and found you really need to fix your low modulation subs first, or it's like trying to drive a Ferrari on a gravel road.
So my question is whether anyone is using connectorized SMs where you need more than ~23 dBi antenna gain, and if so, have you found an external antenna suitable for CPE applications? We tried a few of the Jirous dishes several years back and I was not happy with the mechanical construction. Has anyone tried the KP Performance "Pro Line" dishes, they seem to be mainly aimed at Mimosa applications but there is a version with N connectors. There is also the KPP feedhorn for their 28 inch reflector, I don't think the coax connectors on the connectorized 450 SMs would reach, plus those SMs are discontinued now anyway, we'd have to use the very expensive 450i SM. For CPE applications I'd really like something that could go on a small diameter pipe like the leg of a customer TV tower, and I don't want the installers messing with one of the designs where one set of bolts tightens the mount, the azimuth adjustment, and the elevation adjustment. It seems like the choice is mainly between backhaul antennas which are overkill and cheap CPE antennas which are crap. I know anything we do is going to cost enough to possibly eat all the profits from the particular customer, but I figure we need the sector capacity, and the cost gets amortized over the entire subscriber base, not just a handful of customers 6 miles from the tower on the edge of a sector. This has gotten to be a problem now that Cambium has lost us a couple dB with their latest designs at the same time that we need all subs on at least 6X because video streaming is making us really sweat frame utilization and sector capacity.
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