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Forum Discussion
Nighthawk LTE on AT&T
New here, well very new just found this place. I use my Nighthwak for home internet and have a couple burning questions and cannnot find someone at AT&T knowledgable to ask.
1. Does the Etherne...
1) Yes, you can do that, but suggest turn off the WiFi in the Nighthawk itself.
2) I live in a remote area and I get nothing on my Nighthawk M1 without an external antenna. I have tried two: 1) The Proxicast 4G/LTE cross polarized panel antenna and later 2) a pair of Proxicast 9/11 dBi Ultra broadband antennas arranged in a cross polarized mounting.
I mounted them on a 10' mast from the high point on my house and ran 15' Low loss 50 ohm coax extension cables with SMA female to TS-9 pigtails to connect to the Nighthawk. Where I am, no perceptable improvement in performance from case 1 to case 2.
- With the antennas what kind of service? Who's your provider AT&T as well?
- Also I assume you were logged into the router from. Webpage while aiming? What number or numbers am I needing to watch and what is a good or decent strength? I really do not know how much gain I need. I get 1-2 bars on the internal antennas.
I get 1-2 bars now with the external antennas. You should look at RSRP (and the two below it in the table) and Quality on the Settings > Network > Advanced Info page of the Netgear Mobile app.
AT&T Mobility Prepaid for 6 months, then I'll get it unlocked and try SIMs for Verizon and T-Mobile to see if either of them work.
My objective with this was not for everyday use, but for emergency outages of my Xfinity cable HSI service. With two recent storms this past winter, power, cable, Internet out for a week at a time so we were cut off from all communications.
I am getting about 8 Mbps D/L and 1-1.5 Mbps U/L. The AT&T tower I am connected to is 8.2 km southeast of me at bearing 147 degrees on AT&T LTE Band 12 (700 Mhz). I determined this my looking up the tuple of { MCC, MNC, LAC, CID } as reported on the Network > Advanced Info page on the website OpenCellID.org to find the LAT/LONG of the tower. You can use Google Maps or the service on Mobilefish.com to calculate the bearing and distance from your own location. FInally, I used the compass app on my iPhone to align the antenna direction to that true bearing.
I decided on this method of alignment because trying various other bearings and trying to guess what was best was not getting it done. The antennas are not all that directional that you can detect a null given the variation in signal level over time anyway. I suspect if your cell tower is considerably closer, then antenna direction will be more of a factor. During my testing, I noticed that the Cell ID number never changed. That is regardless of the direction I pointed the antenna I never connected fto a different cell ID even ones I knew to be much closer BUT my location is in a RF "shadow" of the surrounding terrain.
I went to the trouble of mapping nearly 3 dozen cell towers within 8-10 km of my location and generally to the southeast and built an Excel spreadsheet with bearings, distance, and carrier to make any Verizon/T Mobile testing go quicker as far as antenna alignment goes.
- Mind me asking where you're from? I noticed you mentioned AT&T but Km. Also what kind of speed did you have on just the internal antennas? I'm about 5Km from the tower I'm currently hitting on band 12.
eLuddite wrote:
1) Yes, you can do that, but suggest turn off the WiFi in the Nighthawk itself.
... .
I have seen this suggestion early on in other posts, but it was never clear to me why turning off the M1 Nighthawk's WIFI is suggested when plugging it's ethernet port into a another WIFI router's WAN/Internet (input) port. Can you explain the reasoning?
The way I have tried hooking this up on my end, my M1 Nighthawk's WIFI IP range is 192.168.2.20 - 192.168.2.99 and the WIFI router it is connected to has a WIFI IP range of 192.168.0.20 - 192.168.0.99. Based on this, there is no WIFI IP conflict. It is unclear why else we should consider turning off the M1 Nighthawk's WIFI.
In my mind, when you connect the Nighthawk M1 by its ethernet port to the WAN of another WiFi router, you are using the M1 as your Internet source (exactly like a DSL or Cable modem) and then connecting your devices to the WiFi router which creates your LAN, with some clients perhaps hard wired to ethernet ports and others via WiFi.
If you leave the WiFi on the Nighthawk M1 enabled, even using the SSID (wifi network name) as your existing WiFi router, then devices connecting to the M1 will be on a different network (192.168.2.0) than devices connected to your second WiFi router (192.168.0.0) and will not have access to any network resources on your second (existing) LAN (192.168.0.0). If there are no such resources that you care about, then leave the M1's WiFi enabled and it will provide you with just Internet access.
Regardless, your second WiFi router will also complain about double NAT unless you configure it to ignore double NAT.
