What are the implications of using one of the four cellular antenna connections instead of all four.
I have end users that would prefer to use a singular 5G antenna on the roof of their vehicle vs a Pepwave 42G antenna.
Eeeek! Doing that would be sort or like entering a foot race with one’s right wrist tied to the left ankle. ;<) Seriously, though … You don’t’ say which router would be in use. But assuming it’s a 5G device, the best performance that could be achieved with two antennas would be CAT12, I think. With a single antenna, my guess is you’d be down below CAT4 – at best. More than one antenna is required for modern modulation schemes and MIMO. Further, multiple antennas help reduce propagation effects such as Rayleigh and log-normal fading – important in a mobile environment.
Some folks do manage to get by with 5G devices and two antennas and Peplink has made arrangements for that in some of the routers. I don’t know of a case where one attempted to use a single antenna, however. We’ve removed some older NMO-mount antennas which were used with legacy cellular equipment in vehicles and installed new vertical antennas on such mounts – which is a possibility. But a single antenna? No.
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Sorry! The Title has the modem model.
But I agree with you completely! I will always recommended using all the available connections but I needed a reason to tell them beyond cost why it was not suggested to use one.
Thank you for the response!
Yup – you got me there! BR1 5G – great product. They’ll really cripple its performance if used with a single antenna.
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Third box on this page has 1x1 siso, 2x2 mimo and 4x4 mimo so you can see the impact. Like rick said, not recommended.
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One thing to keep in mind is you can still use all four antennas, simply use the small paddles for the other 3. Obviously not as good as all four being outside but should be better than using just one port and the rest empty.
When in a strong signal area you should get the benefit of all 4 and then a weaker signal areas you may only be getting 1x speeds but at least its working.
There isn’t a lot of info on using mixed antennas like this out there, but in my testing it seems to work as you would expect. Not sure if there are any implication beyond speed degradation when using mixed antennas or empty antenna ports, such as it not being good for transmitters in the modem with empty antenna ports.