Need antenna location advice - metal shell RV

Greetings!

We’re building an RV out of a school bus (aka big steel shell), and are planning on installing a MAX BR1 MK2.
We’ll be using 2 roof-mounted (nmo) antennas for the cellular connections, well-spaced from each other, with very short runs of low-loss coax. Those are not my concern.

What is my concern are the two wifi connections / antennas. The WIFI-as-WAN functionality is important to us, as well as the ability to ‘reach out’ to relatively distant / weak public wifi signals. So using at least one roof-mounted, high-gain omni-directional antenna for wifi would seem to be a necessity (as well as possibly having the ability to hook that lead up to a directional antenna).

What I don’t understand is A) what to do with the other wifi antenna for best performance, and B) how (or if it’s possible) to take advantage of MIMO with one or both wifi antennas on the roof. For that matter, I’m concerned I may not be able to get acceptable signal within the bus from any wifi antenna roof-mounted, as once again - it’s a big steel shell, and with a high-gain omni, most of the signal would be directed away from the interior.

Any help would be appreciated. There’s a good possibility I don’t fully understand how the dual wifi antennas work w/ the max br1 mk2. If that’s the case please enlighten me!

Bump and clarification. Maybe I should ask this question a different way.

What would be the best wifi antenna configuration for the max br1 mk2 (which has 2 wifi antenna ports), installed in a sheet-steel enclosure (bus turned RV), for maximizing both Wifi-to-WAN performance, as well as router-to-wireless client performance?

Is one antenna port designed to be used as the Wifi-to-Wan source while the other as a wifi access point? Or do both perform both roles? From what I think I understand, it’s the latter. Which means if I put one antenna on the roof and one inside the coach, Wifi-to-Wan performance would be good, but I’d possibly lose any mimo advantage from router to wireless clients. And if I put both antennas inside, mimo from router to clients would work, but receiving an acceptable wifi signal from outside would be problematic.

Would the best configuration for maximizing public wifi performance with wifi clients inside the coach be both wifi antennas on the roof, with an additional mimo wireless access point (not included w/ the unit) hooked up to the ethernet lan port?

On my boat, I have one non-MIMO Poynting marine 1x14 thread antenna for WiFi connected to my MK2. The second antenna port is terminated/capped. I turned off LAN capabilities and have a separate LAN AP inside for client device connections.

You should be able to use any omni-directional non-MIMO or MIMO antenna that you can find a way to mount to your RV so long as it supports the 2.4-5ghz bands. Just remember cellular towers will likely be higher than your RV and access points could be lower, WiFi signal does not do well with obstructions/penetration.

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Thank you, mystery. That helps. If we were running solely on public wifi, I’m assuming there would be no real advantage to having mimo capability within the RV, as the bottleneck would be the public wifi connection itself. But since we hope to connect via cellular more often than not (which we will set up for mimo w/ 2 roof mounted antennas), having wifi mimo seems advantageous.

Thinking what you’ve done is pretty much what we should do.

I would just make sure the antenna works with both bands of wifi simultaneously. I connect to both 2.4 and 5ghz wifi networks simultaneously over that single non-MIMO Poynting. Since I use Speedfusion, speed is no concern of mine, because Encrypted Speedfusion/PepVPN on a MK2 is only something like 20mbps (although I do let my streaming devices/TVs break out of the Speedfusion VPN but throttle them down so moot point).

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While technically ‘doable’ to provide client wifi and wifi-as-wan using a single device - it is recommended to have a dedicated AP for client and use the Max Transit as wifi-wan. This will be MUCH more reliable and stable for clients.

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More great info. Much appreciated, @erickufrin & @mystery! Think I’m squared away now. Sincerely appreciate your input & advice.