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4G antenna types

hedgert

Casual Member
I am in a rural area and am trying 4G as a solution to poor internet. I can get full signal strength 4G (4 bars) on my iPhone in most of the house, most consistently at the front - so I thought a 4G modem would be worth a shot. I bought an Archer MR400 from Tp-Link.
When installed (at the front of the house on the side of a window) I get 50% signal strength on the router. As my house is a 150 year old stone built house with walls several feet thick I decided to try an antenna mounted outside.
There are 2 Vodafone antennas one forward left diagonal and one forward right diagonal from
The front of the house - so an antenna at the front of the house should have good sight lines.
Installing and attaching the antenna made no difference at all to the signal strength reported by the router - which seems odd.

So my questions:
I found a Google post saying there are different versions of my router (Tp-Link Archer MR400) some with external Wi-Fi antennae and some with external 4G antenna. The box my router came in explicitly says “2 detachable external 4G LTE antennas” - so I’m pretty sure I have a router I can attach external antenna to.
But I see antenna I could have bought with one SMA connection and some (like the one I bought) with two. So I’m wondering if I bought the wrong antenna. This is what I bought:

It has two cables/connectors so I removed both of the blade antennas from the router and connected the two cables from my antenna to the two router connectors. As the antenna is mounted outside on the front wall of the property (no walls between the antenna and masts) I expected better signal strength than inside - where the router box is at least partially impeded by stone walls.

Given I see some antenna only have one cable/connector, have I bought the wrong kind and/or done the wrong thing connecting the two cables from my antenna to the two connectors on my router?
 
Welcome hedgert, which iPhone do you have?

Your archer mr400 is a cat4 LTE device, it will only connect to a single frequency on a single antenna mast.

So the external antenna is a good choice but you need a better router, ideally cat12, though cat6 could work.

Cat6 will connect to both masts and carry out 2 carrier aggregation on two frequencies

Cat12 will carrier aggregate three frequencies from both masts or more.
 
Welcome hedgert, which iPhone do you have?

Your archer mr400 is a cat4 LTE device, it will only connect to a single frequency on a single antenna mast.

So the external antenna is a good choice but you need a better router, ideally cat12, though cat6 could work.

Cat6 will connect to both masts and carry out 2 carrier aggregation on two frequencies

Cat12 will carrier aggregate three frequencies from both masts or more.
It's not really correct not say a better router is required - carrier aggregation doesn't work between two different masts - UK providers haven't really deployed that version (inter-node), not widely at least.

Carrier aggregation mostly only works across multiple frequencies from a single mast, providing the provider has actually deployed multiple frequencies/carriers at a given site.

As we're talking about rural Vodafone here, my general assumption is that there will only be Band 20 (800Mhz) in the vicinity, a better (higher CAT) router isn't going to be able to leverage anything more than a CAT 4 one can in that situation.

However, saying that, there could be other frequencies available, possibly Band 1 (2100Mhz) and that could explain why the router has lower signal 'bars' than the phone - the router's larger/external antenna is able to pick up the higher frequency whereas the phone is not. Without knowing the frequencies each device is connected to when observing the 'bars' comparing them is pretty meaningless. Additionally, 'bars' are not an indicator of throughput, they only represent visually the radio signal levels.
 
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Welcome hedgert, which iPhone do you have?

Your archer mr400 is a cat4 LTE device, it will only connect to a single frequency on a single antenna mast.

So the external antenna is a good choice but you need a better router, ideally cat12, though cat6 could work.

Cat6 will connect to both masts and carry out 2 carrier aggregation on two frequencies

Cat12 will carrier aggregate three frequencies from both masts or more.
My iPhone is an iPhone 12 Pro Max.
So with this router the antenna I have bought should work (so siting it higher might make a difference) but my best bet would be a different router model?
 
It's not really correct not say a better router is required - carrier aggregation doesn't work between two different masts - UK providers haven't really deployed that version (inter-node), not widely at least.

Carrier aggregation mostly only works across multiple frequencies from a single mast, providing the provider has actually deployed multiple frequencies/carriers at a given site.

As we're talking about rural Vodafone here, my general assumption is that there will only be Band 20 (800Mhz) in the vicinity, a better (higher CAT) router isn't going to be able to leverage anything more than a CAT 4 one can in that situation.

However, saying that, there could be other frequencies available, possibly Band 1 (2100Mhz) and that could explain why the router has lower signal 'bars' than the phone - the router's larger/external antenna is able to pick up the higher frequency whereas the phone is not. Without knowing the frequencies each device is connected to when observing the 'bars' comparing them is pretty meaningless. Additionally, 'bars' are not an indicator of throughput, they only represent visually the radio signal levels.
There’s obviously a lot of complexity here beyond my understanding!
My router was connecting on band 20, but this morning I see it has connected on band 8 and is showing 100% signal strength (nothing has changed re siting router or antenna).
But the performance is unchanged - I’ve been getting about 10M download speed (tested using the wifi router I have connected to the 4G router by ethernet that has speed test built in - so no Wi-Fi effects). Whereas with my iPhone on 4G I can get 20Mbps plus speeds reliably even inside the stone walls. So performance is still below what I can get on my phone.
What would you recommend?
I know something better is possible because a couple of years ago I bought a 4G router and installed it in the same place (with no external antenna) and it just worked - I got 20Mbps download speeds with no problems. So it feels that I’ve done something wrong with what I’ve set up this time.
 
Last edited:
My iPhone is an iPhone 12 Pro Max.
So with this router the antenna I have bought should work (so siting it higher might make a difference) but my best bet would be a different router model?
The iPhone 12 max is roughly a CAT20 device, so it can attach to up to five different signals from the same antenna mast.

I say roughly as Apple stopped listing the cat details.

So while the tplink is grabbing one frequency signal, the iPhone is aggregating between two to four times more signal, which equates to greater bandwidth and a quicker speed.

A newer router may make a difference, have you been able to find your local mast on cellmapper.net?
 
It's not really correct not say a better router is required - carrier aggregation doesn't work between two different masts - UK providers haven't really deployed that version (inter-node), not widely at least.

Carrier aggregation mostly only works across multiple frequencies from a single mast, providing the provider has actually deployed multiple frequencies/carriers at a given site.

As we're talking about rural Vodafone here, my general assumption is that there will only be Band 20 (800Mhz) in the vicinity, a better (higher CAT) router isn't going to be able to leverage anything more than a CAT 4 one can in that situation.

However, saying that, there could be other frequencies available, possibly Band 1 (2100Mhz) and that could explain why the router has lower signal 'bars' than the phone - the router's larger/external antenna is able to pick up the higher frequency whereas the phone is not. Without knowing the frequencies each device is connected to when observing the 'bars' comparing them is pretty meaningless. Additionally, 'bars' are not an indicator of throughput, they only represent visually the radio signal levels.
I didn't realise inter-node was not yet fully deployed in this country.

My local O2 masts, 513576 and 513577 work together, one provides band 40, band 8, and the other provides band 20, band 1
 
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The iPhone 12 max is roughly a CAT20 device, so it can attach to up to five different signals from the same antenna mast.

I say roughly as Apple stopped listing the cat details.

So while the tplink is grabbing one frequency signal, the iPhone is aggregating between two to four times more signal, which equates to greater bandwidth and a quicker speed.

A newer router may make a difference, have you been able to find your local mast on cellmapper.net?
Thank you. Yes I’ve found the two masts - one is probably obscured by a hill, but the other has a good sight line.
If I bought a higher CAT router would I need more/different antennas?
 
As far as the antenna is concerned, I would suggest that you check the signal strength (RSRP) for both scenarios, i.e. the MR400 indoors with the original antennas attached and again with the external antenna to see whether the external antenna actually brings any improvement.

I am not familiar with the Archer routers but according to the web, you should get these readings on the admin page of the router. You can also compare that against your smartphone (I assume it is on the same network), get something like Network Cell Info Lite from the App Store.

The description claims 11 dBi gain, which sounds unrealistically high. Even if that was true (for the antenna itself), the 5m cable introduces 4.8 dB loss at 800 MHz rising to 10.7 dB at 2700 MHz. So, depending on which band is being used, the improvement may only be marginal (if any at all).

Whether higher signal strength automatically translates to higher data rates is another matter determined by various other factors, among them the CAT of the router.
 
I didn't realise inter-node was not yet fully deployed in this country.

My local O2 masts, 513576 and 513577 work together, one provides band 40, band 8, and the other provides band 20, band 1
Looks like those are the physical site/location, they just have split eNBs, which is why they 'work together', so its kind of inter-node (involves multiple eNBs), but not actually geographically separate locations (which is typically what I'd classify as inter-node).
 
I have a very similar setup and had previous thread going over similar stuff if you look at that.


Summary is my 4g mast is about 6km away with direct LOS, I was using three sim with b525 and poynt9ng multi direction antenna is attic.

I upgraded to these externally and new router huwaie b818


My speeds went from around 20meg upto av 50 to 80 meg now. Main thing was the antenna improved my signal strength from 110db to 80d odd on the better frequency. IE before I could only connect to the lower speed band with good signal strength, the higher speed band was too weak with internal/ three network frequency's.

I did play around swapping Sims in the new setup between three and EE and EE is definitely faster, wither that's because its a stronger signal or they're using a better frequency et .not sure/ can't remember.
 
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PXL_20220511_173201926.jpg

My iskra directional on the left. 7.5m cable to the router.


Bands and difference summary.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/threads/4g-antenna-positioning-choice.37689/post-266349
 
Hi, folks I have been going mad! I have a Huawei B535 router CAT 7. I have glass french doors when I put my router outside, just about 3ft high I get about 88MB download and 14MB upload speed which is great! When I bring it inside directly behind the glass doors the speed drops to 30MB download and about 3MB upload speeds as far as I can make out I am on band 3 with Three mobile. I thought simply I will get an external antenna I just have to take it to the other side of the door. I bought a Poynting XPOL-1 V2 5G 3dBi Omni-Directional Cross Polarised LTE 2x2 MIMO Outdoor Antenna which made the signal worse. I have tried a couple of antennas and I can't get as good a speed as sitting the router outside! Any advice, please
 

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