I’ve reviewed a number of posts about antennas and the good external links cited. But since there is so much knowledge on this forum, I thought I would just post my situation to get some expert advice.
I am in east Africa, in an urban, moderately hilly place. We have multiple providers with multiple towers in range. Our principle provider is giving us 4g LTE on Band 20 at 800 Mhz. But I keep an assortment of sim cards on my desk for contingency. All those others are 3g WCDMA Band 1 (2100 MHz).
I am running a Max BR1 as the edge device /firewall/ cellular router for our network of 50+ W10 clients. We do quite fine, most of the time. But we are a bit vulnerable, since we have shut down all local storage and servers going with Gsuite and Google team drives for everything.
Currently I am using only the BR1’s built in antennas. I have it mounted on an exterior wall because we have heavy reinforced concrete walls, 10” thick, so the reception drops rapidly inside. I would like an omnidirectional exterior antenna that would give solid reception for any of our mentioned providers. Even the better providers have be known to have lengthy (several weeks) outages. And any tower can go at any time, so I need to be ready for anything without touching the antenna – just shove in another sim to get going. My best mounting point is a pipe we once used for point to point up on a second story gable. It would be about 110’ cable run to the wiring closet where I would like to keep the BR1.
I will have to order every piece, every connector, from out of the continent, so I have to get it all right the first time.
as I understood, you want to mount an external LTE-Antenna with an 110ft Kabel?
The lenght and quality of the Kabel is more important than the antenna or the weather conditions in this case.
For example if you use 110ft Standardcable like teh HDF195 you will loose about 18dB/m at 2000MHz. No antenna will bring you more signal than you are loosing.
If you use one of the best cables, you will loose more than 5dB at 2000MHz (including pigtails) - this is also not great.
So find a better position for the router and use a good cable. It’s much better to take a longer networkcable (max 100m / 328ft) then a longer antennacable.
You can also take an Outdoorrouter like the BR1 IP67 an mount this on a good position.
Hello @it_mbeya,
There is a great amount involved in correctly choosing an antenna system that will deliver the most suitable outcomes for your application.
Most wireless (be that cellular/mobile or Wi-Fi) antenna system for MIMO work best with an out of phase antenna array (+/- 45 Degrees of the vertical), meaning you can have a very tightly packed antenna with exceptional performance. The cabling system needs to be 50Ohm impedance (not 75Ohm as used for Terrestrial TV & most MATV systems). The quality of the cable system can make just as big impact as the quality of the antenna, we run over 50 meter cable runs for some of our clients and get excellent results as we supply a professionally designed fit for purpose solution.
We suggest that you contact your local Authorised Peplink Partner for specialised assistance.
Your local Certified Peplink Partner can help you with a copy of the Antenna Selection Guide for Peplink Partners, this is a detailed guide and is only available to the Peplink Partners so to ensure that you are helped in working through it to get the most suitable antenna solution to your application.
Remember that the majority of these systems are MIMO (Multi In, Multi Out), so you must ensure you use antennas and cabling that are suitably designed for the application.
Happy to Help,
Marcus
There are very few options for an omnidirectional MIMO antenna (two connectors one for main cellular and one for diversity/aux). Alternatively you could possibly use two separate antennas and position them strategically in an attempt to achieve the 45 degree polarization. I did a ton of research and it seems the Poynting option someone recommended here is most cost efficient if you want a single antenna with two connectors.
As for 110 foot cable run that is not good at all (too long) and as others mentioned type of cable is very important. I have a similar issue where it would be a 40-50 foot cable run and what I have opted to do is mount the Pepwave device in a weather tight enclosure 15 feet away and run a CAT6 the remaining 25-35 feet to a second indoor AP/router.
Hello @mystery,
We have looked and and tested many bands and designs of antennas, these are the three manufactures we trust & prefer globally for antennas:
In Australia we prefer to use antennas manufactured by both:
We can not emphasise enough about avoiding the cheep knock offs and poorer quality antennas out there, it is not worth the ongoing costs and poorer reliability & performance.
All of the above mentioned manufactures have reliable and good quality MIMO directional and omni-directional antennas for use in the Cellular/Mobile frequency spectrum and also the Wi-Fi frequency spectrum. Talk to your local Peplink Partner for further assistance in sourcing these if you need.
Thanks for everyone’s kind help. I see two takeaways from the above. First, it would be worth finding a closer mounting location. That is, I think, very doable in my situation, I just didn’t realize cable distance was so significant. Second, I obviously need a dealer willing to provide design help. There are none in country, as I mentioned in my original post. Since I have some on-the-ground shipping help in the US, who is currently organizing some other gear, a US dealer would be the most convenient for me. There are a large number of dealers there and I have no idea who would be willing /able to provide design help for a small order like this. Any suggestions?
Hello @it_mbeya,
Most good antennas will work with multiple frequencies, though some are frequency specific, they all have slightly difference characteristics depending on the manufacture and design purpose (moving location, fixed location, direction of signal pickup), we use extensively LTEA chip sets in Australia and these will often be tuned simultaneously by the system to two different frequencies (such as Band 3 (1800 MHz) & Band 28 (700 MHz) to create the LTEA service).
This is how the two frequencies may be seen from InControl2 to make the LTEA connection
Happy to Help,
Marcus
