Microwave Link LOS Survey

Verifying Line Of Sight (LOS) Verifying line of sight starts with a trip to rooftop. If your distance is under 10 km, then a good microwave path would be at 5 metre above the mature tree line and see at least a 3 metre radius of the remote site. Keep in mind that there are practical limits as to how high you can place an antenna on a roof and generally that's about 4 metre. Higher than that and the antenna mount goes from a simple pole or vsat mount to a more substantial guyed pole. At that point, you'll need a wind-load analysis to determine that the structure can support the guyed pole. LOS Eye Cam

What Constitutes Good Line Of Sight? What exactly is "Line Of Sight"?. A Line Of Sight is one where local and remote antennas can see each other and that the visual path is clear of obstruction (phone and power lines excepted.) That being said, the distance of the transmission and the width of the radio beam determines the amount of path clearance that you need for a solid wireless connection.

A Point-to-Point Microwave Transmission is cigar-shaped, initiating at a focal point from each antenna and fanning out across space, intersecting mid-path with the beam coming from the remote antenna. The area of beam intersection is the widest transmission point and that's called the "Fresnel Zone". The longer the path distance the wider the Fresnel Zone and hence, the more potential for signal reflections or "multipath" issues. As stated earlier, multipath isn't much of a factor until you get beyond 8 km. And that brings us to the other prime influence effecting multipath and that's the angle of the beam as it leaves the antenna.

A licensed microwave using high performance parabolic antennas (commonly called "dish"). These antennas focus the beam to between 0.9 and 2.0 degrees, depending on diameter of the dish. Larger dishes are for longer paths and the larger the dish, the tighter the focal point of the beam as it leaves the antenna.