How do the dual wifi antenna ports work? External vs Internal? Do I need an internal AP?

General
1

I’ve ‘wired’ the vehicle for two seperate rooftop antennas (both dual-band), one for each wifi antenna port, assuming this would give us the most potential to take advantage of MIMO functionality, outdoor accessibility, multiple wifi-wan sources, etc.

I guess what I didn’t think about was internal wifi access (lol).

So my question: Does the unit incorporate an internal wifi antenna in addition to the two external jacks? Or will I have to either:

A) use one of the antenna ports for the interior (in this case, which one? Does it matter?), OR
B) Add a wireless AP for the interior.

Any advice on what I can do, what I should do, & best practices would be appreciated. FWIW, this is a small bus - only 20’ of interior length.

2

Depends how you want to use your WIFI.

If you are planning to connect to other WIFI networks using WIFI as WAN on a BR device then having the router connected to external antennas can really help with range and signal quality. In this case, try it with the antennas hocked up externally, everywhere in the bus should still be quite close to the external antennas still and depending on the material of your roof it may not matter at all. If you find you are not getting good enough WIFI signal in the bus, or you are getting significantly slower than when hocked up wired, you may want to buy an access point for in the bus.

If you will always be using cell for WAN and only using WIFI inside the bus, just disconnect the external WIFI antennas and use the stock antennas that came with your router.

I would highly recommend against having one antenna hocked up externally and the other internally. Some much older WIFI systems could operate like this if they had separate internal chips for each port (not sure if Peplink ever had a device with one antenna for WAN and another for LAN but they did exist). Modern WIFI (N and newer really) expects the antennas to be matched, together and times things accordingly. It’s not that it won’t function like that, you can’t hurt anything trying it but don’t expect good throughput even if the signal strength looks to be better