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Forum Discussion
M1 antenna setup
Hello all, Just ordered 2 Wilson 10dbi yagi's and cables and patch cords, etc. My question is how do you have yours mounted? Stacked, side by side, or + 45 -45 In in a rural area in east T.N. and ...
Let me ask you this, without the antenna, do you still pickup both bands, just weaker on both or do you pickup just one band?
I know for certain where one of the ATT towers is and I have both yagi's pointed towards it. It has been online for years. It was an Alltel tower then became ATT. However, to my knowledge, this is the only ATT tower within 10 miles of my house. The rest are over 12 miles. There is a US Cellular tower about 7 miles away but I don't know if ATT/USC ever share tower space and I have not tried pointing the antennas that way yet. I've taken the cellID's, all other info required and tried entering it on http://cellidfinder.com/ but it doesn't find anything :(
I think I'm wrong! Some info I just found leads me to believe it's not a USC tower but in fact ATT. I'm going to try pointing my antennas that way as soon as I can get time.
jpr78 "Let me ask you this, without the antenna, do you still pickup both bands, just weaker on both or do you pickup just one band?"
with no antenna attached to my nighthawk lte hotspot i only get band 12 that is very weak, unstable, and not usable as a normal internet connection.
i only have one 700MHz antenna. when i connect this antenna to my nighthawk lte hotspot, band 12 jumps to excellent which exceeded my expectations. however, the nighthawk ping pongs between band 12 and band 4 even though this antenna is band 12 only (700Mhz only).
The yagi is a big piece of metal. My best guess is this big piece of metal is big enough to catch just a trace of "poor" signal quality band 4. It does not matter which direction i point the yagi....north, south, east, west, or straight at the ground by my feet.....it still picks up band 4.
as discussed in this forum, don't worry too much about "poor" vs "excellent" or 1 bar vs 3 bars, versus 5 bars. you can have a "poor" signal that easily outperforms an "excellent" signal. it all depends on band, frequency range, etc. the bottom line for me is speedtest. as long as my speedtest is good, i'm happy.
regarding adding a second antenna, for me personally, it would have to:
1) stabilize my speeds, where i get 50Mbit all day, every day, consistently (versus what i have now which is 20-50Mbit which is good, but not a stable 50Mbit.)
2) CA speeds, LTE-A speeds, a sizeable increase in speedtest.....going from 50 to 90 for example.
unless that second antenna gives me great stability or a big increase in speedtest, it's hard to justify investing the time/money/effort to running a second antenna to the roof.
Also, try each of the two ports on the back of the device.
I read on a google search that the left port, looking from the back, is the primary.
I'm be curious to know what would happen if you got a wide band antenna. It may be possible that would get much better signal on the B4 then the switching between the two might not matter.
jpr78 "I'm be curious to know what would happen if you got a wide band antenna. It may be possible that would get much better signal on the B4 then the switching between the two might not matter"
1) towers are in two different directions. i would likely need two yagis....omni directional antennas do not have enough gain in my rural location.
2) in my rural location, we are lucky to receive 700MHz. in general, higher frequencies are going to be sketchy out here. i might not be able to improve band 4 signal with an antenna.
3) the limitation with wide band antennas is gain. low gain solutions might work in the city/burbs.....but rural is a whole different thing.
that all said, if AT&T is going to ping pong me between towers and bands, i have no option but to try wide band if i need faster speeds and see what happens. right now family has no complaints about 20-50Mbit speeds with one external yagi antenna.
I can't imagine why a wide band wouldn't help. If you are already picking up the weak band without it, I feel sure it'll improve the signal. Again, as I've mentioned with my setup. The signal is there but unusable for me without an antenna. The antennas makes both B12 and B4 usable. I'd get the wideband and point your one antenna directly at the B4 tower first to see what happens.
I had a little bit of time to play around with my antennas and see if I could improve signal. Here's what I noticed(of course in my case). I tried the two antennas in a "V" shape for the first time. I didn't see any real difference between "V", ">", "<" though. Then I tried a single yagi, completely vertical just like you have. Holy band hopper! I saw B2, B4, B12 and B30. The nighthawk jumped around to all these bands. However, none of the signals were usable(good to know what bands are out there in my area though). It really makes me wonder what kind of signal I might get if I was on the roof and not in the attic. I would need longer LMR for that though and I can't help but wonder if the gains would be negated by the length of cable. I'm current using 25' cables. Finally, I left that one antenna vertical and mounted the second antenna horizontal. In this configuration, I'm surprisingly seeing slightly better signal than the "V",">","<" formations . My RSRP stays closer to -110 and the RSRQ stays closer to -8. My downloads and uploads have been better last night and this morning in this vertical/horizontal configuration as well. Most notably the uploads have gone from 2Mbps to 4Mbps on average. I need to see how things go for teh remainder of the week with the antennas in this orientation. When I can find more time to test more I certainly will but that's all I got for now!
How do you "see" the bands?