In all three cases the cellular antennas were intentionally not connected as the cel modem was not in use. I’m wondering if an intermediate step could be added to help avoid such reports, e.g., check and see if a SIM card is installed before running a diagnostic routine or (if Peplink recommends antennas be installed at all times even if he modem is not in use), to add a software switch to disable the modem so the antennas can be removed.
Kudos to Peplink for adding this feature. I’m just recommending an additional “step” be added so the warning message is not seen unnecessarily.
Hello @Rick-DC,
This also appears to be an issue for when you may only be using a single antenna on a modem, such as with a Cat4 (UBR, Balance 20x) or Cat6 chipset where the customer (for various reasons) may only use the “MAIN” antenna connection and leave the “AUX” disconnected.
We have several customers with M2M/IoT deployments like this, and firmware 8.3.0 does not handle only a single antenna connected with a multi-antenna modem.
In some cases, we are considering rolling back to 8.2.1 to remove the alarm status.
Happy to Help,
Marcus
Hmmm. Right. Makes me think of another possible solution: Have the diags default to ON but provide a switch to simply turn the procedure/routine OFF. As a whole, this feature is quite valuable. There are just some circumstances where its use is probably ill-advised.
Clarifying the message would help here too. Currently it’s rather cryptic and makes users think their device is failing. If the message were to state the reason for the concern, that could be another option. Something along the lines of
“Cell 1 Main and Auxiliary antenna signal is extremely poor, please check antenna connections.”
or
“Cell 1 Main antenna signal is considerably worse than cell 1 auxiliary. Please check antenna connections.”
Ultimately, giving the user information to help address the potential issue would be a great way to go rather than alarming users that their device may be malfunctioning.
I also notice inconsistencies with HD2 Mini’s reporting this error for only Cellular 1 and not Cellular 2, where a few are reporting the error on both interfaces as expected.
None of my devices have diversity antennas connected so in theory they should ALL be displaying the warning for Cellular 1 and 2 which they are not.
