Hello, friends! So I am a professional engineering scientist, but I do electronics repairs in my free time to pick up cash here and there, and sometimes even pick up sweet equipment people just give me because they think or have been told it is/was impossible to repair. I am able to repair about 95% of the things I come across, even if it means designing the replacement part myself.

But the other day, I get a call from a guy with an XR700 who completely decimated an antenna. With any other router, this would be an easy blow-and-go fix; you'd just give whoever a link to a compatible RP-SMA dual-band antenna and they could replace it themselves. Plus they'd likely add some signal gain in the process with a higher gain aftermarket antenna set. But seeing as how the XR700 employs 802.11ad with the 60GHz band, I'm quite sure I'm safe in assuming a generic dual-band antenna isn't going to work here (even though mathematically and theoretically it could). And since 802.11ad was never really accepted as any "industry standard", I can't really cannibalize an antenna from any other unit. Furthermore, I haven't found a way to get in touch with Netgear to ask if we can purchase a replacement antenna specifically for the XR700. So I'm running out of options and not really sure how to approach this fix.

So if anyone could answer the following questions, I'd be forever grateful:

1. Is it possible to get/purchase a replacement antenna from Netgear specifically for the XR700?

2. Does anyone out there know of anyone or anywhere I could get a replacement antenna specifically for the XR700?

3. Is there a compatible aftermarket antenna out there I could use to replace the broken XR700 antenna with instead?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Forum Discussion

Nighthawk XR700: Antenna Upgrades and Replacements