External aerial not helping Mifi?

[Jev88]

I have the Huawei E5577 through a motorhome WiFi labelled base station and their big aerial mounted on a metal plate on roof. See image for similar.
If I disconnect external aerial the signal is no different (okay but poor).
Is there a setting to turn on aerial like on my old Zyxel router?

 

[Guigsy]

I often found that the aerial didn't give me more signal strength bars. But I did get more bandwidth.

 

[DBK]

I have the Huawei E5577 through a motorhome WiFi labelled base station and their big aerial mounted on a metal plate on roof. See image for similar.
If I disconnect external aerial the signal is no different (okay but poor).
Is there a setting to turn on aerial like on my old Zyxel router?
View attachment 783328

I don't believe there is any internal setting. I just plugged mine in to the two connectors and it worked.

 

[AndyPK]

When we used our 5577, I found that it very much depended upon where in the ‘van it was located as to the strength of the received signal - have you tried moving it around to see if it improves (eventually I had our taped to the top of the side wall near a cupboard…)

edit : we didn’t use an external aerial….

 

[Langtoftlad]

I have a ZTE MF910 - the external antennas appear to make no difference .

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[Howard B]

I didnt notice any difference when I plugged mine in to the RUT590. Running the broadband speed checker the download & upload speeds were very similar. Could have saved myself £120 and 4" on the roof height.

 

[Jev88]

Just thought I would update this thread.
I was very disappointed and mystified by the large puck aerial (probably from Motorhome WiFi but an older model?).
Just tried Bingfu 4g and.........

38mbs compared to old puck aerial at 8mbs! And they aren't even outside on the roof yet, just magnetically mounted one horizontal and one vertical about four feet away in cupboards high up.

Test again in Lincoln next week.

 

[FrankNicklin]

If the signal is poor there is no way to boost that signal. I’ve spoken to independent mobile service equipment providers and they never sell external aerials or boosters as they just do not work. You cannot make something out of nothing. Amazon advertise loads and a Google search will result in many types. A client of mine out in the sticks had dreadful broadband and poor mobile signal. I raised this issue with various equipment providers and none said a booster would work.

 

[Guigsy]

If the signal is poor there is no way to boost that signal. I’ve spoken to independent mobile service equipment providers and they never sell external aerials or boosters as they just do not work. You cannot make something out of nothing. Amazon advertise loads and a Google search will result in many types. A client of mine out in the sticks had dreadful broadband and poor mobile signal. I raised this issue with various equipment providers and none said a booster would work.

That's true to a degree. But instead of sending and receiving the signal in a uniform globe, your roof mount antenna can favour the horizontal plane.

 

[gus-lopez]

If the signal is poor there is no way to boost that signal. I’ve spoken to independent mobile service equipment providers and they never sell external aerials or boosters as they just do not work. You cannot make something out of nothing. Amazon advertise loads and a Google search will result in many types. A client of mine out in the sticks had dreadful broadband and poor mobile signal. I raised this issue with various equipment providers and none said a booster would work.

This^^^^

Ours at home is rubbish. As the Tiekom engineer told me you can improve the reception but you cannot improve the signal.
If the signal is useless & all over the place you are wasting your time.
We ,& others locally, have tried everything. Only way forward if the coverage isn't improved , & that is doubtful as it hasn't in 20 plus years, is to move.

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[starquake]

If the signal is poor there is no way to boost that signal. I’ve spoken to independent mobile service equipment providers and they never sell external aerials or boosters as they just do not work. You cannot make something out of nothing. Amazon advertise loads and a Google search will result in many types. A client of mine out in the sticks had dreadful broadband and poor mobile signal. I raised this issue with various equipment providers and none said a booster would work.

Complete and utter rubbish. Mikrotik LHG devices (which are abotu 3/4 the size of a sky dish) can pull in 20-40Mbit in less than one bar/ no signal on a handset situations. VERY directional antenna which thrive in low to no signal. TV/media/I use them regularly in my line of work to do temporary uplinks from places where other "engineers" have claimed no signal is possible - and this lack of knowledge means such consultancy is extremely profitable. I mean they are a £300-500 antenna mind! And you wouldn't I add put these on a motorhome as the wind shear would knock them off soon as you drove anywhere). They work by having the actual router up near the dish so you ALSO get no cable signal loss (you run cat5 up to them), and part of the reason external antennas can be poor is signal loss in the actual coax tails which means the antenna gain is negated by losses in the coax.. Honestly welcome anyone near Brid to come see the static van setup we have there on a perm install with EE and Three in an area where NEITHER gets any signal on a handset, yet we are sitting with 40-80Mbit on EE and 10-25 on Three depending on the conditions. More than happy to consult for your client and install such kit assuming you are actually in range of a tower, but we've installed in highlands of scotland succesfully with a 30km hop to nearest tower... (I would stress that installing an LHG is "complex" and not a simple to use item like a Huawei or ZTE dongle). I would stress aligning such an antenna is the skill as a 2mm movement in left or right alignment results in 25% of the speed, and thats the hard thing to do requiring someone who's done it many times (as you have to actually program it to favour a specific cell on a specific frequency to align or it just moves to another during alignment so you don't see any progress...). Because of the wind shear on above install we have to realign it usually every 4-5 months -> which then causes the signal to stick to the best cells as they have the best signal to noise ratio.

The point I will agree on is if the local cell is congested, a LHG will help you get more "share" of that cell but won't fix the oversaturation of the cell. But why we use them > other kit in palces is it can be benefical sometimes to ignore the nearest cell entirely, and do a long shot alignment to a cell in a town further away (which sounds counter intuitive). Using an omni diretcional antenna such things woudl not be possible. Key example in Brid is we are when you check the coverage map preferring a Three cell that actually points/serves traffic south of Hornsea rather than north where the static van actually is. The one pointing north is so congested it's useless to us.

https://mikrotik.com/product/lhg_lte_kit is the Cat4 varient, but the cat18 varient does have multi paths.

The motohomewifi type solutions have a gain that is tiny, but in mobile signal terms tiny can be difference between 0.5Mbit and 20. As they are omni directional the gain is "less" is the summary. They are less good than a LHG but work better in a van. I would not be without ours as we've not had a site this year since install where we have not had signal. Where some of the same sites PRIOR to the install we had low/no signal on a iphone. Installed well they do provide an improvement and somtiems an improvement is all that is needed.

 

[Howard B]

ALSO get no cable signal loss (you run cat5 up to them), and part of the reason external antennas can be poor is signal loss in the actual coax tails which means the antenna gain is negated by losses in the coax..

Starquake, Just quoting part of your last post.
I was thinking of shortening the cables on my antenna so asked Solwise which connectors I would need. They said not to bother. "2m isn't that long when it comes to loss so I don't think it should be a big priority"

 

[autorouter]

If the signal is poor there is no way to boost that signal. I’ve spoken to independent mobile service equipment providers and they never sell external aerials or boosters as they just do not work. You cannot make something out of nothing.

It depends on what exactly you are trying to do. And what exactly you mean by 'poor'. If you are trying to improve the signal to a smartphone, then you have the problem that a phone aerial is about the size of a postage stamp, and is hopeless at catching a weak signal. And it almost certainly will not have any aerial inputs so you can attach a bigger aerial.

However a router will probably have external aerial ports. A big aerial will capture more signal, because it has more surface area. An omnidirectional aerial can concentrate its beam on the horizontal plane, not in the vertical directions. If you look at the aerial specifications it will have a dBi number. This tells you how much better it is than a standard 'stick' dipole aerial, which is 0dBi. Typical router aerials are 2 dBi to maybe 5dBi. You can get directional aerials up to 2.4dBi, but obviously they need to be carefully aligned to the phone mast. Not much use while driving, and a pain to set up every time you stop. But they definitely work.

And then there's the cables from the aerial to the router. Radio frequency (RF) cables and connectors are notoriously fickle, and need to be treated with care. Just bending them a bit too much can set up reflections which muddy the signal, and the connectors need to be perfect or you get reflections and noise. Typically the connectors are literally gold-plated to ensure a good connection.

And then there are the methods described by starquake, which again will definitely work, but are more suited to a fixed installation rather than a motorhome.

In terms of mobile phone reception, you can set up a router, and use its local wifi. Enable 'wifi calling' on your phone, or use something like WhatsApp that sends calls over wifi.

 

[starquake]

Starquake, Just quoting part of your last post.

I was thinking of shortening the cables on my antenna so asked Solwise which connectors I would need. They said not to bother. "2m isn't that long when it comes to loss so I don't think it should be a big priority"

Well I'm a ham, and my view is the thicker the cable the better -> the short (thin) type coax used in pigtails to antenna has horrendous loss, and longer is worse. When you talking ham radio at least you seek to avoid this except for the short pigtail from antenna (thick) wire to actual handset, or entirely if you using a fixed base install.

I'd have to get out my text books to look at actual loss but https://kv5r.com/ham-radio/coax-loss-calculator/ is probably worth a read, ie, the pigtails used in mobile are really only sorted to short loss. In my MH the pigtail on the "thin" wire to the antenna on the LTE router is sub under 15cm.

 

[Guigsy]

For me, will shortening the cables on my Poynting MIMO roof mount from 2m to 1m make a significant improvement to my mobile broadband service? I suspect it'll be only slight.

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[starquake]

And ref; if anyone is interested in doing a fixed base Mikrotik install, remember those (expensive) cat5 fed antennas have zero wifi, you ALSO need a router inside a property to take the router and make it a usable internet signal on wifi (setup correctly it acts as a BT openreach modem would, with a hidden vlan to enable you to manage it, check it's status etc). The Mikrotik gear basically acts as a supplied by BT/Virgin connection would, and the "handoff" to customer is a cat5 cable to the WAN port of a router. With the right router though you can power the dish via the cable so no additional power supplies needed making cable runs easy.

If you do "all mikrotik" with routers, you can even do stuff like we do at the in-laws where we use 2 dishes in parallel, with a psedu load share, where the TV's use the EE signal (unless the inbuilt testing shows it's too slow) and everything else uses Three, but with a seamless failover if either dish or network fails or is underperforming. Programming stuff like that to make it "acceptable" to 70 year old parents so in event of problem they just press a button or disconnect a cable in event of trouble to force a failover was most certainally not easy! In general none of those things are "needed" but in extreme situations you can bond all 4 providers in UK -> and there are specialists in doing that too mostly for media -> there a Blackmagic (I think thats the vendor) box I've seen used that bonds 4 LTE routers, but it costs around £5k BEFORE you add the LTE modems and antennas so it's not exactly even prosumer gear!

 

[Howard B]

For me, will shortening the cables on my Poynting MIMO roof mount from 2m to 1m make a significant improvement to my mobile broadband service? I suspect it'll be only slight.

According to Solwise, not worth the effort & if you dont do it correctly you could make it worse.

 

[starquake]

For me, will shortening the cables on my Poynting MIMO roof mount from 2m to 1m make a significant improvement to my mobile broadband service? I suspect it'll be only slight.

slight I would suggest -> I'd actually if you can check it's using the roof antenna as I've seen some installs where the connection from pigtail to the dongle wasn't working right or wasn't getting a solid connection in the van. You'll know in your dongle/routers advanced diagnostics if you get a lower db of "usable" signal -> how that shows in your router varys based on manufacturer, but in general you should get a "lower" loss for higher bandwidth with antenna connected versus not. If the SNR or RSRQ as some routers call it (https://wiki.teltonika-networks.com...ived Quality,of the received reference signal.)

doesn't drop with the external antenna connected, chances are it's not working right. (counterintuitively -10db is better than -20db on RSRQ and ditto -80 is better than -104 on RSRP.

 

[starquake]

What I mean is try it with the antenna disconnected, take a reading, then try with connected. If they are the same the external antenna chances are hasn't got a connection or cable broken/not working.

 

[Lenny HB]

For me, will shortening the cables on my Poynting MIMO roof mount from 2m to 1m make a significant improvement to my mobile broadband service? I suspect it'll be only slight.

Cable drop at the higher bandwidth is approx 1db/m when you only have a max of 5 or 6db gain to start with it's quite a bit.

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[DABurleigh]

For what it's worth, I recently spent a day researching mobile internet solutions and concluded my preferred solution consists of a mifi router with 4x4 mimo antennas, many hours battery life, as high a Cat # as I'm prepared to pay, inside a small, lightweight, waterproof plastic box parked on the roof by a skylight with a red cord hanging back down inside as a pre-flight check. If that fails, on rare occasions I will take my trusty roach pole out of the garage and give it some more height.

Dave G4WIZ

 

[starquake]

Using the above linked cable loss calulator with roughly mobile frequencys and power levels (800mhz) and 0.5w which I believe is the max most dongles TX/RX at the loss on the pigtails is about 20% per metre so a 20% loss on 1m, and a 37% on 2m of (thin)coax. So rather then not making a difference I suspect the solwise assertion of minimal loss is incorrect and shortening and reterminating if you confident may be actually meaningful indeed assuming you can actually do the shortening and retermination safely. And the loss is worse the heigher the frequency so with modern LTE being 1.8ghz, 2.1ghz or higher now ... it's meaningful indeed. Effectively the cables under the antenna may be responsible for 25% loss of signal if 2m versus 1m.

And Dave is also correct that running internal antennas with less loss may be better, as wifi travels better than the coax. Thats the main reason the Mikrotik and some other antennas don't use coax back to the router ... it's less lossy to have the router doing the mobile INSIDE the antenna as you have efectively 0 loss.

 

[starquake]

Ie, sorry Dave putting a router in a box on a pole and using it via wifi can in some circumstances be better than running a (long) coax to same location.

 

[Peter and Julie]

I have the Huawei E5577 through a motorhome WiFi labelled base station and their big aerial mounted on a metal plate on roof. See image for similar.
If I disconnect external aerial the signal is no different (okay but poor).
Is there a setting to turn on aerial like on my old Zyxel router?
View attachment 783328

Yes there is. I have similar on mine and had to select external aerial on software for it. Should be in your setup for the router paperwork. I remember having to hunt around a bit on the router settings pages though.

 

[DABurleigh]

I just said it was my preferred solution. Its key aspects are 4x4 mimo external antenna, no cable & connector loss, decent CAT # at moderate total cost and easy to gain more height when needed in extremis. I certain wouldn't cripple an expensive internal router with only a 2x2 mimo, let alone cables and connectors.

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[Gromett]

Well I'm a ham, and my view is the thicker the cable the better -> the short (thin) type coax used in pigtails to antenna has horrendous loss, and longer is worse. When you talking ham radio at least you seek to avoid this except for the short pigtail from antenna (thick) wire to actual handset, or entirely if you using a fixed base install.

I'd have to get out my text books to look at actual loss but https://kv5r.com/ham-radio/coax-loss-calculator/ is probably worth a read, ie, the pigtails used in mobile are really only sorted to short loss. In my MH the pigtail on the "thin" wire to the antenna on the LTE router is sub under 15cm.

Once you are under a certain length of cable the number of connectors has more of an impact than the length. Each connector imposes losses that exceed a metre of cable in all test I did (from memory).

 

[Jev88]

Yes there is. I have similar on mine and had to select external aerial on software for it. Should be in your setup for the router paperwork. I remember having to hunt around a bit on the router settings pages though.

Well I can't see it? Any tips?

 

[starquake]

Well I can't see it? Any tips?

Try a different browser/device to the admin page. The "mobile" page on our ZTE from a tablet and the app gives different options when we use it on a PC based device.

Mad that teh app can't do everything but it's how these things are nowadays, and why we tend to travel with a cheap PC as well as a tablet.

 

[starquake]

The thing that annoys me with the ZTE is you can only get to the proper signal information on the PC via an advanced settings dialog, not available on the mobile app at all (ie, the actual RSRP/RSRQ values).

 

[Peter and Julie]

Well I can't see it? Any tips?

Not got paperwork with me. I'd google your router model with setup external Ariel. Some routers don't have external ariel points to plug in to.

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