Understanding what needs to be covered is an important part of the planning process, so do some quick calculations to better understand the situation. For indoor coverage, understand the effects of the attenuating and reflecting materials where the coverage is desired. A link budget will tell you what is practical given the environment and how to plan cells. With a link budget, one can have an estimate of how many cells will be required for the project. Tradeoffs take place between more cells and running more power. For an outdoor application, also consider checking the Fresnel zone. For example, the tradeoff between working on one long-distance shot versus two back-to-back links can be discovered by working out a few things on paper first.

Fresnel Zone For a point-to-point shot, it is important to understand the effects of the Fresnel Zone. For an indoor application, this can be skipped since the losses are calculated into the link budget. So what is the Fresnel Zone?

In a Fresnel Zone, the signal extends from the transmitting antenna to form an ever-expanding cone. Although some of the signal travels directly in the line of sight along the center of the cone, other parts of the signal reradiate off points along the way. At the receiver, signals from the direct line of sight indirectly cancel and add to each other. The first Fresnel Zone is the surface containing every point for which the sum of the distances from those points to the two...