I have a max transit duo cat12 hooked up to two Poynting OMNI-402 2x2 MIMO antennas. I currently have one element in each antenna connected to each modem.
To restate, antenna A is hooked up to one connector on cellular 1 and one on cellular 2, and antenna B is also hooked up to one connector on cellular one and one on cellular 2.
My thinking was this increases the chances of getting a good signal for each modem by increasing diversity, based on some Poynting technical documentation. I’m second guessing that because I’m seeing fairly frequent cases (with t-mobile specifically) where if I only have one connection in use I get great speeds, but if I enable a second then the speeds drop way down (eg. 50 mbit to <1 mbit) even for traffic only using the first connection. I’m wondering if this configuration is also more likely to increase interference. The two antennas have a 10 foot horizontal separation and 2 foot vertical separation.
I don’t see the signal quality drop off on the t-mobile connection when it slows down, however this is hard to reproduce on demand so I’m not 100% sure on that. It is certainly possible this is just t-mobile congestion issues but I wanted to see if I could rule out the antenna setup or see if it is worth trying to swap that to dedicate one antenna per modem.
Don’t do this. Use one antenna per modem. The modem will manage its own ‘in use’ frequencies to make sure they don’t conflict. By putting one modem element next to another in use by a different modem you could very easily have two side by side elements in the same 402 housing that are both trying to send and receive on the same frequencies.
Check the historic WAN Quality signal graphs to see if you can identify this happening. Look for the SNIR readings.
Thanks again @MartinLangmaid, I swapped them over and things seem much better. It is hard to tell for sure because tmobile is still fairly flaky in general here, but that is now consistent regardless of if I’m using one or both modems.
As a side note, after I swapped them over my router kept going into a reboot loop whenever the speedfusion cloud connection came up and I had to delete all my speedfusion cloud configs and redo them from scratch to stop that, but I’m sure that is unrelated and just showed up because I pulled the power to do the antenna swap and had been playing with my speedfusion cloud settings before I did that so I’m not concerned about that.