The new AF11FX next to its smaller sibling the AF5X
When I first started testing the new AF11FX, I mistakenly assumed it was a AF5X converted to 11ghz.
After all, that's what the other radio manufacturers had done.
But after using it for a few days, it suddenly dawned on me that I needed to re-think my pre-conceived assumptions.
My experience with the AF11FX was sort of like driving a new car that you assumed was a normal sports car and then one day when you need to pass someone, you discover it does zero to 60 in 1.5 seconds. You say to yourself, hmmm interesting, so the next day you check how fast it goes and discover it does 240 mph all day long, and corners like an Indy car. Then you discover the engine is built so well it easily revs to 12,000 rpm compared to 3,000 - 5,000 rpm of a normal car.
You end up blown away by the incredible performance from what you thought was a normal sports car.
Well my experience with the AF11FX, has been much the same. The more I tested, the more blown away I was, and the more I realized that this was by leaps and bounds the best radio Ubiquiti has ever made.
My link was 16 miles (25km). Pretty far. Because of the longer distance, I expected 6X. First thing I noticed is that it caught 8X the instant it associated, even though the aim was still far off. After a little aiming, it held very consistent full speed 8X.
I first used two 680mm (2-foot) Jirous dishes with about 35dBi of gain. I had signals around -60 which allowed super clean 8X. But then I did some math and thought, what the heck, lets enable 10X on a narrower channel size where there's more signal margin and see what this baby might do. With a narrow channel it instantly caught 10X at 16 miles, with 2-ft dishes! Wow!
So that got me thinking. A little more math and I figured out with just 4 dB more dish gain I might just be able to get 10X at 16 miles on a regular full 40mhz channel. It sounded like a long shot, but was worth a try. So I got in some 1200mm (4ft) dishes. I decided to first upgrade the dish on just the master side and see what happened. I didn't even finish aiming and it was solid 10X! On a 40mhz channel in both directions.......at 16 miles.
The AF11FX doing 1-gig aggregate, 10X 1024 QAM full duplex throughput on a single 40mhz, licensed channel pair.
With one 1200mm dish and one 680mm dish, at 16 miles distance.
I had mistakenly assumed that Ubiquiti would make very nice mid-range performing 11ghz radio, and disruptively price it. Instead it became obvious that the AF11FX was engineered to take on the top of the line $13,000 radios. And leave the mid-range and the wifi based bottom feeding radios in the dust.
Its all about EVM and AirFiber's "secret sauce"
With other radios, there are limits to the distance at which they can achieve 8X (256 QAM). That's because of poor transmit Error Vector Magnitude (EVM). In layman's terns, EVM is how cleanly, accurately and consistently a radio places dots in a decode constellation.
If you're sloppy in placing dots, you end up with a lot of misses and retries. If you're already having problems getting the dots in the right places because of poor EVM, after you add a couple of miles of link distance, you quickly end up no longer achieving 8X.
To achieve the next big step up 10X, you need much, higher EVM's. A dead giveaway that a radio is based on cheap chipsets (such as wifi chipsets), is their inability to achieve 10X.
Because of much better EVM, AF11FX's margins to achieve 10X are actually greater than the other guys margin to achieve 8X. Think about that. This radio does 10X better and more consistently, than other radios do 8X. It's that simple.
And its all in the better engineering. From what I understand there's a lot of fancy, proprietary "special sauce” the AirFiber engineering team has come up with in order to get this previously unachievable performance from the AF11FX. Compared to the competition, all of this allows the AF11FX to have faster, longer links, with smaller dishes.
16 miles is by no means the limit for 10X. I hold the record for now, but I bet one of you can easily beat me with a longer link. And the distance for 8X? My math says that even 2ft dishes will allow 8X at 50+ miles. And with larger dishes much, much further.
And of course remember that the 8X on the AirFiber line always packs a lot more bits than 8X on other radios, especially wifi based radios.
And in addition to the awesome performance, these radios are super low latency full duplex radios. At a price that's unheard of for high performance full duplex.
(I'll talk more about the features, why you want full duplex and additional photos showing the easy antenna connection in a follow up story)
Designing and building a new radio is like designing and building a new car. You design the best engine, best transmission, the best suspension, keep the weight down, etc. You hope it all works, but until you send it out to different drivers on various race tracks, you're never really sure what you have.
Now that the AF11FX is beginning to be deployed, and these amazing results start coming in, I think everyone from the engineers who designed it to Ubiquiti management should be celebrating what they've accomplished. This is truly an amazing radio, and we the user base should be giving them a standing ovation.
The new AF11FX next to its smaller sibling the AF5X
When I first started testing the new AF11FX, I mistakenly assumed it was a AF5X converted to 11ghz.
After all, that's what the other radio manufacturers had done.
But after using it for a few days, it suddenly dawned on me that I needed to re-think my pre-conceived assumptions.
My experience with the AF11FX was sort of like driving a new car that you assumed was a normal sports car and then one day when you need to pass someone, you discover it does zero to 60 in 1.5 seconds. You say to yourself, hmmm interesting, so the next day you check how fast it goes and discover it does 240 mph all day long, and corners like an Indy car. Then you discover the engine is built so well it easily revs to 12,000 rpm compared to 3,000 - 5,000 rpm of a normal car.
You end up blown away by the incredible performance from what you thought was a normal sports car.
Well my experience with the AF11FX, has been much the same. The more I tested, the more blown away I was, and the more I realized that this was by leaps and bounds the best radio Ubiquiti has ever made.
My link was 16 miles (25km). Pretty far. Because of the longer distance, I expected 6X. First thing I noticed is that it caught 8X the instant it associated, even though the aim was still far off. After a little aiming, it held very consistent full speed 8X.
I first used two 680mm (2-foot) Jirous dishes with about 35dBi of gain. I had signals around -60 which allowed super clean 8X. But then I did some math and thought, what the heck, lets enable 10X on a narrower channel size where there's more signal margin and see what this baby might do. With a narrow channel it instantly caught 10X at 16 miles, with 2-ft dishes! Wow!
So that got me thinking. A little more math and I figured out with just 4 dB more dish gain I might just be able to get 10X at 16 miles on a regular full 40mhz channel. It sounded like a long shot, but was worth a try. So I got in some 1200mm (4ft) dishes. I decided to first upgrade the dish on just the master side and see what happened. I didn't even finish aiming and it was solid 10X! On a 40mhz channel in both directions.......at 16 miles.
The AF11FX doing 1-gig aggregate, 10X 1024 QAM full duplex throughput on a single 40mhz, licensed channel pair.
With one 1200mm dish and one 680mm dish, at 16 miles distance.
I had mistakenly assumed that Ubiquiti would make very nice mid-range performing 11ghz radio, and disruptively price it. Instead it became obvious that the AF11FX was engineered to take on the top of the line $13,000 radios. And leave the mid-range and the wifi based bottom feeding radios in the dust.
Its all about EVM and AirFiber's "secret sauce"
With other radios, there are limits to the distance at which they can achieve 8X (256 QAM). That's because of poor transmit Error Vector Magnitude (EVM). In layman's terns, EVM is how cleanly, accurately and consistently a radio places dots in a decode constellation.
If you're sloppy in placing dots, you end up with a lot of misses and retries. If you're already having problems getting the dots in the right places because of poor EVM, after you add a couple of miles of link distance, you quickly end up no longer achieving 8X.
To achieve the next big step up 10X, you need much, higher EVM's. A dead giveaway that a radio is based on cheap chipsets (such as wifi chipsets), is their inability to achieve 10X.
Because of much better EVM, AF11FX's margins to achieve 10X are actually greater than the other guys margin to achieve 8X. Think about that. This radio does 10X better and more consistently, than other radios do 8X. It's that simple.
And its all in the better engineering. From what I understand there's a lot of fancy, proprietary "special sauce” the AirFiber engineering team has come up with in order to get this previously unachievable performance from the AF11FX. Compared to the competition, all of this allows the AF11FX to have faster, longer links, with smaller dishes.
16 miles is by no means the limit for 10X. I hold the record for now, but I bet one of you can easily beat me with a longer link. And the distance for 8X? My math says that even 2ft dishes will allow 8X at 50+ miles. And with larger dishes much, much further.
And of course remember that the 8X on the AirFiber line always packs a lot more bits than 8X on other radios, especially wifi based radios.
And in addition to the awesome performance, these radios are super low latency full duplex radios. At a price that's unheard of for high performance full duplex.
(I'll talk more about the features, why you want full duplex and additional photos showing the easy antenna connection in a follow up story)
Designing and building a new radio is like designing and building a new car. You design the best engine, best transmission, the best suspension, keep the weight down, etc. You hope it all works, but until you send it out to different drivers on various race tracks, you're never really sure what you have.
Now that the AF11FX is beginning to be deployed, and these amazing results start coming in, I think everyone from the engineers who designed it to Ubiquiti management should be celebrating what they've accomplished. This is truly an amazing radio, and we the user base should be giving them a standing ovation.
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