Yes, at 2.4 GHz (which is a ham band - that's why you can use 5 W boosters legally if you have a license) cable losses are appreciable. The way we beat them is to put the amplifiers (for both directions) as close to the antenna as we can possibly get them i.e. at the top of the tower. The cards in the controllers apparently do 25 (?) dbm or thereabouts which is plenty to drive a amplifier through a piece of cable with 5 dB or so loss. If that amp has 5 dB gain you will radiate 25 dBm from the tower top. If it has 10 dB gain you will radiate 30 dBm and so on. On the receive side you want a low noise figure preamp at the antenna with enough gain to overcome the cable loss down and the noise figure of the card in the controller.
What would make the problem interesting here is kluging up a system which would allow the MIMO (multiple antennas: beam forming, polarization synthesis) aspects of the system to work.
Simplest thing to do would be to relocate the cards to the top of the tower and run power and CAN bus, MODBus or whatever the card communicates with on the baseband side up to it.
What would make the problem interesting here is kluging up a system which would allow the MIMO (multiple antennas: beam forming, polarization synthesis) aspects of the system to work.
Simplest thing to do would be to relocate the cards to the top of the tower and run power and CAN bus, MODBus or whatever the card communicates with on the baseband side up to it.
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