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4G mast preferred over slightly farther 5G one

OK, I couldn't leave it alone. I was literally having dreams about playing with this stuff.

Though I sent the CPE Pro back to EE, I bought an unlocked CPE Pro 2 off eBay and have immediately sent it off to Router Mods to get the antenna ports fitted. I'll get some PAYG cards for Three and O2 as well as EE and have another go.

I've been looking for another directional antenna to add to use for 4G. Not sure if I've done the right thing, but I've bought a duo directional. Looks like a TV antenna, but a pair of them oriented at 45 and 315 degrees. I'll stick that on the pole pointed at the town center, and give it another shot when the router comes back.

I enjoy tweaking this stuff. Will post a video shortly from the 1st round with the CPE Pro 1. I'll make another video with my results from the CPE Pro 2.

If it's still an epic #fail with the CPE Pro 2, I'll just flog it again on eBay. No harm done.
 
The itch. :)
Are they Iskra antennas? They are good. Let us know how it goes.
 
They were unbranded but look exactly like that. This is what I bought:


Now that I google Iskra, it's cheaper. I couldn't find this cheaper anywhere, sadly. The difference is 5G support (just in case, it gives me more options) and the 10m cable. The other version has only a 75cm cable, which obviously isn't long enough.

Maybe I spent too much, I should have asked for advice here first. Can anyone recommend any online shops for antennae?
 
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Well, usually what google says, but since brexit try to avoid european stores, longer waiting times and border duty fees ... :(

Watch out for cheap long cables, cable losses for high frequency (5g) is a very real thing and might negate whatever gain the antenna supposedly gives you.
 
Hi, my directional 4G antenna arrived today. Aerial man coming Friday. I've still got doubts where to point it. If EE are to be believed, then it has to point to the town center mast as I originally understood.

But some of my tests showed that the garden center one (Cell ID 7982081) was giving out a full 5G signal on Band 48. The 4G Band was Band 3. That one is closer, so in theory I should use that one, but EE said no.

I had worked out that pointing to the town center is dead easy, it's directly to the rear of my house. However, pointing to the other one is more tricky. I can only go off google maps and my own angular guesswork. I saw a YouTube video where in the US, people in RVs have got Wilson meters. I looked for a signal meter on eBay and Amazon, and some stores but couldn't find any anywhere. :-(
 
Hi, my directional 4G antenna arrived today. Aerial man coming Friday. I've still got doubts where to point it. If EE are to be believed, then it has to point to the town center mast as I originally understood.

But some of my tests showed that the garden center one (Cell ID 7982081) was giving out a full 5G signal on Band 48. The 4G Band was Band 3. That one is closer, so in theory I should use that one, but EE said no.

I had worked out that pointing to the town center is dead easy, it's directly to the rear of my house. However, pointing to the other one is more tricky. I can only go off google maps and my own angular guesswork. I saw a YouTube video where in the US, people in RVs have got Wilson meters. I looked for a signal meter on eBay and Amazon, and some stores but couldn't find any anywhere. :-(
There is no way to tell from CellIDs which mast 5G is coming from - NSA 5G cannot allow for that because the 5G cell ID cannot be correlated to a mast. The only thing you can tell for sure is which mast you're anchored to on the 4G bearer using the 4G CellID.

In your situation, the only mast that has 5G is the city center one (B&Q if I remember correctly?) and as the CPE Pro's external antenna connectors are for 5G only (4G uses the internal antennas) then you have to/should definitely direct a directional antenna towards the city center site.
 
OK, I have put a pair of directional antennas (angled at -45 and +45 degrees) pointing towards the town center. I've now got an unlocked CPE Pro2, modified by RouterMods, with the 4G directional antennas and the 5G XPOL2 connected to it. I've got hold of a Three SIM, and got O2 to replace my phone's SIM for a 5G version. The EE SIM is on the way (they were a pain in the a.....) I know there's no Vodafone 5G in the town, so didn't bother with them. My roof antennas now look like a SETI search station!

After lots of messing about, here's the best results I could get:

O2: 9 Mbits/s download.
Three: 18 Mbits/s download, until I disabled band 3+20, then 80 Mbits/s download!

On Three, it was connecting to a completely new mast high up on the water tower of a hill outside the town center. This wasn't giving me a 5G signal at all. The only way I could persuade it to disregard that was to turn off band 3. Then it picked another wrong mast on band 20, and that was even worse. After I turned off band 20, finally it connects to the town center mast on band 1, and I get 5 bars 4G+ and 4 bars 5G. More importantly, I can get up to 86 Mbits/s.

Though it works, the speed and reliability are extremely variable. I applied this fix: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/threads/huawei-cpe-5g-pro-issues-help.36302/ and it seems a bit more stable. I keep getting random drop-outs.

Worse than that is the annoying redirections. Sometimes when I try to access a URL it will open the Huawei router admin page prompting for the password. It was worse over Wi-Fi. The Android phone keeps asking for network sign-in. When I tap the notification, I straight away get another notification that it's connected. So I browse away and it happens again a few minutes later. Does anyone know what that's all about? (This 'bug' is irrespective of whether I use Three or O2).

Thanks for all the advice. I'm hoping that the EE connection will be more reliable and faster. Will post an update when that comes and I've tested it.
 
Think I've seen that redirect to the admin router page when the router does not receive a radio signal (or you've switched off the available bands). That was with the 525 or a 535 when I was playing about with bands a while back and managed to disable what I wanted enabled.
 
"My roof antennas now look like a SETI search station!"

@cmsdloma pictures or it didn't happen :)
 
@Lucian Tee-hee, here you go :)

My FM omni is broke, I know, I'm renaming it a semi-omni.
 

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I've added my flaky Three connection into a Gateway Group on my pfSense router. If the weather's nice, and it picks the right mast, I get 50 - 80 Mbps downloads from it, but latency is still rubbish at about 50-60ms.

Still waiting for the EE Sim card. As soon as it comes, I'll test and post results.
 
Well the new EE SIM finally arrived and I've been doing some testing. I'm getting 4-5 bars 4G+ and 2-4 bars 5G. The good news is that the 5G drops out less, and the speeds are much higher than with Three. I'm seeing download speeds fairly consistent between 60-70 Mbps. Reliability is better with the modified Huawei CPE Pro2 running off the new 4G directional antennas, compared with EE on the Pro1 with the internal antenna.

The bad news is that with LTE H-Monitor I'm seeing a lot of flitting from one cell to another. It can't make up its mind. Its so bad that sometimes its switching continuously to the point that the windows notification bubble in the corner is permanently there.

I get the best download speeds from the town center mast, but despite having the antennas pointed at it, it doesn't want to use it. It mostly still prefers the "Mick's carpets" mast, but wanders between others too.

Cell: 3403271 ("Mick's carpets")
Cell: 8273671 - can't find where this is?
Cell: 6786824 (Town center)

Here's a sample of the event log:

05/05/2021 13:09:02 CellId 6786824 Connected to cell 234-30-11063-6786824 (eNB Id:26511)
05/05/2021 13:09:26 CellId 3403271 Connected to cell 234-30-11065-3403271 (eNB Id:13294)
05/05/2021 13:10:48 CellId 8273671 Connected to cell 234-30-11065-8273671 (eNB Id:32319)
05/05/2021 13:10:49 CellId 3403271 Connected to cell 234-30-11065-3403271 (eNB Id:13294)
05/05/2021 13:13:03 CellId 8273671 Connected to cell 234-30-11065-8273671 (eNB Id:32319)
05/05/2021 13:13:37 CellId 3403271 Connected to cell 234-30-11065-3403271 (eNB Id:13294)
05/05/2021 13:14:48 CellId 8273671 Connected to cell 234-30-11065-8273671 (eNB Id:32319)
05/05/2021 13:14:57 CellId 3403271 Connected to cell 234-30-11065-3403271 (eNB Id:13294)
05/05/2021 13:16:08 CellId 3403271 Connected to cell 234-30-11065-3403271 (eNB Id:13294)

I'm not sure what to do now. Should I turn the 4G directional ones to point to cell 3403271?

And if I do turn the 4G ones, should I also turn the 5G one? Someone earlier said that 5G could be coming from somewhere else (it always seems to be band 48). But someone else said EE hadn't enabled cross mast usage, so i am a bit confused.

Can anyone help me find cell 8273671? The search on cellmapper.net doesn't work for me.

EE is definately giving me the best performance out of O2, Three and EE. I'm gonna stick with it, but I'd like to tweak it and stop it flitting between masts.

As always, your advice much appreciated.
 
I believe for now EE has not enabled this multi-mast feature (forget the technical term), so you should point all your aerials towards the same spot.
 
8273671 is showing on Cellmapper as Tatenhill Common, Tatenhill, East Staffordshire, Staffordshire, West Midlands, England, DE13 9RS.

Band 48 is LTE-H monitor bug/issue, we don't have N48 in the UK, only* N78 - N48 is a subset of N78, which in turn is a subset of N77... confusingly!
...OK, we do have N28 (700mhz) now, and N1 (Vodafone DSS)... but they're not wide spread

EE do have intra-node ENDC (though perhaps not everywhere?), only O2 don't have it anywhere AFAIK.
You should be able to point your 4G antennas towards any of the ENDC enabled masts (cellmapper reports them as 5G ENDC enabled) and still be able to connect to the 5G from the city center site (which is where you should direct your 5G antennas - at least until other sites are known to have 5G enabled)
 
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Hi @GavinAshford, you're correct. I've had a good chat with Chris at Router-Mods, who has been extremely helpful. I now understand what's going on.

Using LTE H-Monitor with the 5G graph on, I have concluded that the 5G signal is only coming from one source - the town center. This is regardless of whichever mast the router connects to on 4G.

What was misleading me was just doing dumb speedtests, because the 4G bands are also adding to the bandwidth with carrier aggregation, and the router still keeps switching between them. I had assumed that the connected cell in H-Monitor was the only one.

So now that I know for sure the 5G only comes from the town center, and I still get it even when connected to any of the 3 nearby masts, I'm going to turn my 4G antenna round to point to the "garden center" mast which is the closest, but leave the 5G antenna pointing to the town center.

Also my french directional antenna could be rubbish so I've ordered the Poynting equivalent as well as another XPOL2-5G. I'm going to use the high gain directional ones to strengthen the weak 5G signal from the town center and use the XPOL2s on 4G pointed at the nearest mast. Having 4 2x2 antennas instead of 2 will hopefully give me double the throughput as well. That's the plan anyway.

Fiddling around at 1am last night I got it up to 134 Mbits/s! Just need to resolve the constant switching and get the speed up.

Will keep you all posted.
 
If the metrics, particularly SINR, aren't strong enough then assuming you already get Rank 2 (2 streams out of 4 MIMO) then you're unlikely to get any more streams (Rank 3 or 4). Rank 4 is very hard to get in ideal signal conditions anyway, so Rank 3 might be all that is achievable (+50% theoretical)
 
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Update. I put the pair of Poynting directional antennas up on the top of a 16' pole, and the extra Poynting XPOL2-5G. The two XPOL2s now face the garden center mast.

Unbelievably, it doesn't want to lock onto this closer mast which officially services my neighborhood. It likes to connect to a mast, not one, but two masts directly behind it. This third mast (site 32319, far left on the map) is admittedly on a hill, and also has band 7 whereas the other two are only band 3.

My 4G signal strength is always 5 bars now, but the speed isn't as good as before. It's the same 5G signal (coming from town center), which is nearly always 4 bars, sometimes 5. The good thing with this new setup is there is far less switching between masts. It's quite stable.

In terms of SINR, I get 22 dB on 4G and about 15-19 dB on 5G. The 5G signal has a considerable variance. In terms of RSRP, I get about -83 dB on 4G, but a mere -100 dB on 5G. We tried hard to get it stronger but we couldn't. Disappointingly the Poynting directionals aren't performing any better than the "cheap" French ones.

After countless tests, I think the best mast could be site 13294 (aka the Mick's carpet's mast), because it's closer than the one I'm connecting to now and has bands 1, 3 & 7.

So I'm planning to turn the XPOL2 antennas back round facing to these, which are about 45 degrees off the town center one. What I fear is it going back to the continual switching again, especially if opening up to more bands. What can I do but trial and error.

About MIMO, adding the extra 2 antennas made no difference. Though to be fair it's not comparing like with like. When I turn these XPOL2s back round again then I am hoping for some better MIMO performance.
 

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What a saga! Thanks for keeping us in the loop!
 
Haha, that's a great read. I feel your pain. Loving your antenna stack with phased panel antennas. Did I read earlier you had FTTP and if so why are you so keen to get 5g? Is it the holy grail?


Gordon
 
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