dazmatic
ULTIMATE Member
Afternoon everyone.
I'm after a little advice regarding antennas and their failure modes.
I have 3 antennas mounted outside about the eaves of my bungalow, pictures of antennas attached. One is a chinese made grid antenna tuned for B3/B1/N78 frequencies and the other is a pair of Iskra P60 LPDA antennas.
I'm using Three and connecting to Band3 4G primary. With the Iskra antennas, I get around 98dBm on a good day with the antennas being around 10.5dB of gain at 1800mhz. This is 5 miles-ish from the mast so pretty good antennas as far as I'm concerned.
I wanted more however and got the chinese grid dish antenna for 1800mhz with a reported gain of 24db+. Obviously, to expect 24dB from a chinese antenna is unrealistic however I would expect 17/18dB at least with the dish.
Initially, when I installed the dish I was getting 92-94dBm of received power so an increase over the Iskra and have continued to use since. Past few months however, received power levels have dropped on the chinese grid dish to upwards of 108dBm and subsequently I've changed back to the Iskra which is currently floating around 97-100dBm.
Nothing has changed, nothing has moved, cabling is fine. My question, what else could have caused the received power to drop like this? Is it just poor quality antenna?
Point to make, this has happened after weather events - high winds etc but the position of the antenna hasn't moved so could be coincidence?
I don't want to pull the mast down and remove the dish to check but it's it's pretty useless I may well.
Just interested to see what the thoughts could be on this.
Thanks all
I'm after a little advice regarding antennas and their failure modes.
I have 3 antennas mounted outside about the eaves of my bungalow, pictures of antennas attached. One is a chinese made grid antenna tuned for B3/B1/N78 frequencies and the other is a pair of Iskra P60 LPDA antennas.
I'm using Three and connecting to Band3 4G primary. With the Iskra antennas, I get around 98dBm on a good day with the antennas being around 10.5dB of gain at 1800mhz. This is 5 miles-ish from the mast so pretty good antennas as far as I'm concerned.
I wanted more however and got the chinese grid dish antenna for 1800mhz with a reported gain of 24db+. Obviously, to expect 24dB from a chinese antenna is unrealistic however I would expect 17/18dB at least with the dish.
Initially, when I installed the dish I was getting 92-94dBm of received power so an increase over the Iskra and have continued to use since. Past few months however, received power levels have dropped on the chinese grid dish to upwards of 108dBm and subsequently I've changed back to the Iskra which is currently floating around 97-100dBm.
Nothing has changed, nothing has moved, cabling is fine. My question, what else could have caused the received power to drop like this? Is it just poor quality antenna?
Point to make, this has happened after weather events - high winds etc but the position of the antenna hasn't moved so could be coincidence?
I don't want to pull the mast down and remove the dish to check but it's it's pretty useless I may well.
Just interested to see what the thoughts could be on this.
Thanks all























