Hello @rrherrick,
@MartinLangmaid is on the mark and well placed in his advice.
Antenna separation depends on the antenna design. As a basic, you need to keep your antennas out of phase based on the frequency design of the antennas you choose to use. If the antennas are for fixed installation, you need to also consider the provider’s towers with the angles and antenna phases. If the antennas are for a moving installation, you need to consider serviceability and flexibility of connecting with different provider towers. With the rollout of the new 5G networks, this is even more important to get the antennas correct for optimal performance.
Our team often installs antenna cable runs of over 20 meters, though there are a lot of things that go into making that work well:
- Choice of Antenna(s) (stick with the reputable higher quality brands)
- Choice of Surge Protection (proper surge protection is well worth the expense)
- Choice of connectors used on the cabling (what is the PIM Rating)
- Choice of cabling (we often will now use low loss Heliax, as used by most telco).
With two or more modems, one can consider looking at Hybrid Couplers. Good quality hybrid couplers often cost more than having an additional antenna. However, they become a necessity when you have a unit like the Balance EPX and 15 LTE modems (30 antenna connections) on a moving object like a boat or mobile operations centre (@PeterWest has some great examples of these deployments in the forum and on the Peplink website). Even with physical building installs, such as Data Centres, getting multiple antenna connections in can be very difficult to run that many individual cables from outside, so the correct use of Hybrid couplers to minimise the required cable runs is essential. The concepts apply just as much to the smaller dual modem device like the Pepwave MAX HD2 & HD4 models.
Finally, avoid using mobile boosters/repeaters with your LTE Modems, this has been addressed many times before in the form, you can see a selection on this here in the previous post.
You may like to ask your local authorised Peplink Partner for a copy of the Antenna Selection Guide available to them from the Partner section of this forum.
Your local Certified Peplink Partner can help you with a copy of the Antenna Selection Guide for Peplink Partners . The detailed guide and is only available to the Peplink Partners so to ensure that you get helped in working through it to get the most suitable antenna solution to your application.
Happy to Help,
Marcus 