[MLB-WIRELESS] Waterproof casing advice...

[Donovan Baarda]

G'day,

In the process of getting together all the gear to connect to another
site about 50~100m away. I have minitar AP's, cable glands, POE stuff
etc. The only things I'm missing is a waterproof box to put the minitars
in, and a pole and mounting bits and pieces.

As the distance is so small, I wanted to try using the standard little
minitar omnis instead of some sort of additional aerial. This way I can
put the minitar+aerial in a sealed plastic box, with only the cat5 with
POE going into it via a single gland.

I had a look at the Jay-car boxes. There are two boxes that could fit
the minitar+aerial (on an awkward angle, but the larger sizes were too
big). They both have nice rubber seals, and the only difference appears
to be different plastics (one grey, the other white, with different
plastic TLA's). They are $15+ each, which seems kinda pricey for a
plastic box.

I was thinking a $2 tupperware container sealed with silicon and mounted
on a pole with large cable ties should be good enough for the job.
However, I have a few concerns;

1) will tupperware plastic perish badly under UV exposure. Will a coat
of white spray paint help? Will some paints interfere with the RF?

2) most tupperware seems to use clear thermoplastic. Will the light
going through the tupperware heat and/or UV degrade the AP itself? Will
a coat of white spray paint help? Should a choose a non-clear tupperware
container?

3) Are cable-ties a bad idea for pole-mounting? I have a heap of very
big cable ties (50cm long, 1~2cm wide) that I have used outdoors before,
and they seemed to degrade a bit, but only broke under repeated flexing.
I _think_ they would be OK for this application, but welcome feedback.

4) I want to mount it on the existing TV aerial pole. Ideally I would
attach it to the pole just below or above the TV aerial. Would this
interfere with the TV? I could try attaching an extension pole to the TV
aerial pole; any hint's on the best way to do this? What about
lightning?

The best sized case I've found is a black-plastic VHS video container.
However, I don't know how the black plastic would handle UV, and it
would probably be trickier to silicon seal than a tupperware container.
Anyone tried using one of these?

Basically, what is a decent budget RF transparent case that would fit a
minitar+aerial, and what's the best way to mount the sucker up a pole.

-- 
Donovan Baarda <abo at minkirri.apana.org.au>
http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/


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