Unstable voltage WS-6-MINI

[aaronfitz]

I'm launching my WISP imminently so I have 3 "towers" being tested in my yard on tripods, each with a WS-6-MINI.

One of the three has its voltage indicators constantly jumping around while the other two are stable. I get voltage alerts that both 48V is too high and 3.3V is too low. If I pull more than 10W or so to downstream PoE radios the 3.3V appears to dip low enough to bring the switch down and it never recovers. I'm using an identical PoE brick for all 3 of these and even swapped between switches to see if it was an injector problem. That doesn't appear to be the case.

Is this something that a bad cable could cause, or does it sound like this unit is defective?

[sirhc]

Possible causes

1) Bad crimp end or cable. Think about it, if one crimp is bad or one wire is broken then one of the wires may not be carring the current and thus the voltage drop will be higher as not all the wires are being used.

To test the ends and wire using it to connect to a 1G device and make sure the device connects at 1G as all 4 pair are required to achieve 1G connection

2) You damaged your unit some how.

3) Your unit may be bad as faulty units do happen sometimes.

To RMA read posts 1 and 2 of this thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1259

[sirhc]

What are you using to power the WS-6-MINI, you mentioned a POE brick but what model is it (be specific)?

How long is the cable?

What are you powering with the WS-6-MINI?

What firmware version are you using?

[lligetfa]

Are you using a 50V AF PoE brick that delivers power on all 8 wires?

How well is the ground bonded?

Do you have the latest firmware?

[aaronfitz]

Hey guys -- thanks for the replies! I will check on the exact model number of the PoE brick and recrimp the cable tonight. It's the toughcable pro with the drain wires, so the ground should be bonded well but if it's still misbehaving after a recrimp I'll put a multimeter on it

Yes, I'm powering with the AF PoE brick that provides 50V on all 4 pairs. The cable length is about 25 feet. I've tried powering various combinations of these devices downstream; the behavior seems to be isolated to watts total and not individual devices
* 3 Ubnt airMax AC lite APs
* 1x Mimosa 5ghz ptp backhaul
* 1x ML-60-35 backhaul

Results were identical between firmwares 1.4.0rc4 and 1.3.9

[aaronfitz]

Just wanted to check in.. I tried the following which didn't resolve the behavior.

* Recrimping both ends of the cable
* Replaced cable with a premanufactured one
* Swapped PoE bricks
* Upgraded to 1.4.0rc11 that was released

I swapped in one of the other units and that one is behaving fine. I'll prepare this one for RMA

Thanks for the responses guys!