sundance-communications.com Forums Telephony Discussion Phone & VoIP Systems Nortel Telephones & Systems Companion Wireless System

Hey guys! I am usually not a Northern guy but circumstances have forced me into a spot where a Northern Dealer is not giving them the service they need. So Verizon has called on me to look at this system. I am familliar with micro-cells as I have put many in for Tadiran systems so I get the the whole concept pretty well.

Here's the scenario, they have like a 350k sq foot building with 14 bases. I think this is the smaller Companion BTW as the main control units are working off 120 ac. I went around and the signal strength never goes below 2 bars and usually is always 3. What happeneds is that in some parts they cannot call out or step into an area and it just drops. Here's the kicker...it's not all the time and not consistant. BTW the system had been in for over 3 years and was working just fine until 3-4 months ago...which I asked the question has anything changed and nothing has. Another though was hey, are they out of talk paths on the bases? Well, they shouldn't be as ea base can support 4 tdm channels and they only have 14 handsets throughout the complex. Any suggestions would be appreciated...the only 3 things I could think of is this:

1) One base is freaking out

2) Bad main controller or is going bad

3) Loop limit on cable. Looks to be damn close to max. (need to know if local power can be provided to bases)

Thanks guys!

I did have a problem once with power to a base. My transformer was in the tel. room and I ran the power to the base on a single pair. The base powered up seemingly fine, but I couldn't make it work. (The red light on the unit stayed on) I parallelled (sp?) the power to a second pair and Bingo!, it worked just fine.

You also may want to do a "re-evaluation" in the companion programing (Under Radios, I think) which causes the bases to talk to each other and figure which ones are neighbors, etc.

Also check the bases in programming to make sure they are all up. (I don't remember exactly how to do this)

Of course, and it sounds like you already have, check to find out what else was happening around there when this problem first started.

Good Luck!

Thanks for the reply. Is this re-evaluation a program run on the system to locate bases next to each other?

If they are running wireless internet as well the problem may be interference between the two. The wireless 2.4G phones are the same frequency as the microwave which is 2.4G. Wireless internet can be 2.4G as well.

Yes, the re-evaluation is run through programming and it causes the system to determine which bases can hand off to each other.