Wireless Modem and Repeater

websterling · Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 4:49 pm Post subject: Wireless Modem and Repeater

I have a Sprint U727 modem and a Clear Voice 1900 repeater. I live in a rural fringe area and got the repeater for both the cell phone and for broadband. The Clear View Yagi is mounted on a mast 5 foot above the roofline, connected with 30 feet of cable.

The repeater works fine for the phone- 5bars when I'm a few feet from the repeater. The modem works fairly well, averaging 975MBs download speeds.

The problem occurs with uploads. In a situation where there is a fair amount of upload activity, the repeater issues an alarm and shuts down for 1 minute.

I have corresponded with Clear Voice's tech concerning the matter and haven't gotten a clear answer as how to avoid the problem. The manual says that the alarm is triggered by an oscillating feedback between the repeater's 2 antennas. The tech keeps saying the repeater is designed to do this when the ouptut level goes above 5mW, but he's never confirmed at which antenna. I assume it's the inside one because it seems to me that there would need to be a bit more power than than coming from the Yagi for the signal to carry back to the tower.

His only suggestions were to turn the inside monopole antenna to the horizontal direction and try pointing it in different directions and moving the modem to a different location. Neither makes that much difference.

And the problem is somewhat intermittent- sometimes I can go an hour or more before it happens, other times any upload activity triggers it. I haven't yet found a pattern to it.

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with this repeater, how it has worked for them, if they've had this or any other problem with it and how they've solved them.

Thanks,
George