Ruckus R550 vs R310 Antenna Patern

[veno77]

Hello,
I replaced Unleashed R320 with R550 and I see some of my devices which have been at Moderate or Excellent Connection before now are showing as Poor. My R320 was mounted on the ceiling and I placed on the same place the R550. But now when I looked at the Antenna Paterns of the R550 it is totally different especially in the Elevation. Does this mean that the R550 have better coverage bellow the unit, and I don't benefit anything on placing it on the ceiling facing downwards?

What would be the best position for the R550?

Thanks,
Veno

[syamantakomer]

Hi Ventsislav,

Is it a high density environment? If yes, I suggest doing a site survey and then install the APs or do a post site survey.

R550 is specially designed for the dense environments.

If you look at the antenna pattern, it is different than our other R series APs.

For more information about the R550, please refer the details from the datasheet.

https://webresources.ruckuswireless.com/datasheets/r550/ds-ruckus-r550.pdf

Regards,
Syamantak Omer

[veno77]

Hi Omer, it is at my home. I used it for a demo site to test new things with Ruckus. Absolutely no dense enviroment. I have like 40-50 devices - most of them IoT devices. Strange is that devices connected 5 meters away in the same room on R550 are shown as Poor connected.... I think there are still some bugs to be fixed in the future 200.9 release. My home network currently is using 2 x R320 + 1 x R550. Upgraded from 2 x R310 + 1 x R320.  I made some changes in the AP positioning since R320 like all previous R series devices have mushroom like antenna pattern, while the R550 (I see it is same for R650) have sphere or ball like antena pattern, being in the center of it. Will see if I  can improve the coverage of my 3 story house plus front and back yard.

[DarrelRhodes]

Hi Ventsislav,

I have confirmed with our PLM and the azimuth antenna radiation pattern of the R550 is only marginally different to that of the R320.  Unfortunately there is a small error in the R550 datasheet which omits the black overlay pattern for the Beamflex+ pattern on the azimuth.

Unleashed 200.9 and the R550 have some advanced RF optimisation technologies (e.g. auto-cell size) - it may be that you need to disable the 'auto adjustment' feature and ensure the AP is fixed at maximum TX power.

If the issue persists after making the above changes, do you have another R550 unit you can test with to see if you get the same results?

Regards,
Darrel.

[veno77]

Hi Darrel,

Thank you for your reply. The first thing I tried was setting the TX power to FULL, honestly I didn't see any change. I suppose AUTO is working also to FULL if there is no close interference, and I have only 3 APs, they should work on 2.4Ghz at 1,6,11 channels most of the time, and they are far enough to not interfere on 5ghz band. Can you ask your PLM to publish updated Datasheet online? If the current one is wrong, this is quite confusing. I spent some time this evening trying to position the APs in different places than before, but if the R550 azimuth antenna pattern is wrong in the datasheet this means my new position is worse than the old one! I didn't have enough time to redo Site Survey after all the repositioning today.