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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.