I have a Max-BR1-Pro 5G installed on my boat and I use a single external LTE/5G antenna and works great with ATT. I want to connect to the marina WIFI AP to avoid using all the time my LTE bandwidth.
So I configured the “WIFI as Wan” but the signal strength is very low because my boat is too far from the marina WIFI AP or because the router is installed in the bottom of the boat where there is a lot of electronics.
So I bought a WIFI external antenna and plug into the WIFI Antenna A connector and for the WIFI Antenna B I installed the small internal antenna that come with the kit.
The signal is not better. I can’t reach correctly the marina WIFI AP.
Do I have to connect 2 external Antennas to WIFI Antenna A and to WIFI Antenna B connectors?
Which one I have to use? A or B?
Do I have to buy a splitter and connect the single external WIFI antenna on both A and B connectors?
Lots of variables to flesh out here. You first might grab a laptop and go sit in the marina office where the wifi signal is strong and figure out whether the marina is advertising a 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz Wifi. 2.4 will have longer range, 5Ghz will have faster speed. If that works, repeat the laptop experiment sitting in your cockpit. (Basically confirm that the marina wifi is working because a lot of marina wifi’s are not that good out on the dock).
If you don’t want to get a 2x2 mimo antenna, then experiment with the A-B ports and your existing wifi antenna. Go into the BR1 settings to enable one wifi frequency at a time and test.
There are several different 2x2 MIMO Wifi Antennas that will give you a single antenna with two cables to connect to your BR1. Then in the BR1 settings, choose either the 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz wifi depending on what you found out in the marina office test. Peplink sells a couple such as the 20G, Poynting has their Omni 496.
If the marina wifi is bad at dock level and you are technically inclined you can look to something like a MikroTik ‘bullet’ radio that you would pair with an antenna and place it up the mast. In this configuration you would run an Ethernet cable down to the WAN port on your BR1`. Getting a antenna up high might help reduce interference and get you a better line of sight to the marina wifi antennas. (This route is a bit fiddly though).
Lots of forum posts on the internet that you can search for the topic of marina wifi that will give you a deeper dive into this subject.
If you dont do a MIMO dual-band wifi antenna, then you can put a terminator on the Wifi B port. Will limit your throughput, etc, but I get away with using a SISO antenna on Antenna port A on a similar peplink device. Make sure you consider the type of wifi antenna, you probably want omnidirectional, and one that has internal antenna polarization and angles that will get a clear LoS of the access points that you are connecting to.