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Kit recommendation for Rural East Yorkshire

Quick update on the NR5103E and thanks for all the help and recommendations so far.

So I didn’t get chance to check permissions for an aerial, but I got the router from eBay and for a ‘grade C’, it’s immaculate!

I plugged it in, stuck my giffgaff sim in it (as we’ve still got unlimited data on there for now) and we’re getting ‘good’ sometimes ‘excellent’ signal with the internal internal. The external antennas supplied have, so far made little difference, and we are connected to a mast (assuming I’m using cellmapper right), about 3 miles away to the north west. Speeds aren’t full 4G but they’re significantly better than the old TP-Link router. (About 10Meg down and 8Meg up)

I’m trying different locations around the caravan but it seems that the corner that’s on the right compass heading toward those masts is the best spot. I’m also going to try 5G only mode to see if I can force it to another mast, as well as sticking the Smarty SIM in it when this credit expires. Then the big antenna if I get permission!
I wouldn't even ask permission if your allowed to put an antenna on your caravan, I've seen plenty of people over the years who have TV antennas and SkyTV dishs on theirs all over the country and Mobile 4G or 5G antenna is no different but if you ask they may say no, if you don't they'll likely not care or even realise what it is.
 
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I wouldn't even ask permission if your allowed to put an antenna on your caravan, I've seen plenty of people over the years who have TV antennas and SkyTV dishs on theirs all over the country and Mobile 4G or 5G antenna is no different but if you ask they may say no, if you don't they'll likely not care or even realise what it is.

Yeah, that's a good shout.
 
Problem I have found is how do you router the cables once its on the satellite pole don't fancy drilling holes
 
... I would personally try and direct antennas towards south Humberston across the water - there is a mast right on the coast giving B1+B3 for Three - It likely has B32 as well so there's potentially 45Mhz bandwidth up for grabs.
....

For antennas, a pair of LPDA antennas installed at 90 degrees to each other - height is important here, given your remote location the higher the better....

@dazmatic I've got the kit in hand and am up at the caravan this weekend and I'm going to exactly this (points upward) .. I've got the compass heading toward the mast you talk about, but I'm unsure about how to orient them 90degrees to each other, if one is pointing at the mast, should the other one be pointing 90degrees to that on the x axis or do you mean on a different axis?
 
They need mounting with both at 45° to the pole, and 90° relative to each other. Both need to be aimed directly at the mast. The idea is to be able to receive/transmit simultaneously with both antennas, with the 90° cross polarisation reducing interference from one to the other.

This photo from Solwise shows the mounting arrangement:

4g-ren6702709-lpda-5.png
 
dan_m2k:

I have just seen this thead for the first time. By coincidence, I live just south of Easington, so have quite a bit of experience/knowledge of signals and providers in the area.

The mast 9326 in the map in your first post is at Beacon Hill, Welwick, and is where I get my Smarty Broadband from: locking onto Cell 6175 Band 20, with Carrier Aggregation on Band 3.

There is a mast in Easington for EE. It only has Band 3, but might serve you well. It is quite a bit nearer to Kilnsea compared to Welwick. I tried EE for a month on that mast earlier this year and was typically getting about 30mbs download speed.

I went back to Smarty as it is about half the price of EE, and with my new router detailed below, am able to just about match the EE speeds.

I did try pointing my external antenna towards the South Bank of the Humber and Grimsby, but got no joy. I suspect the towers over there are directing there signals towards the populace on that side and not sending signals northwards. Highlighting tower cells, suggests that is where they focus. (Experts may correct me that this is not how towers work!).

I recently tried a high spec router (Cat 18) but it actually performed worse than my old Huawei B535-333. If there are only two bands available, it is my experience that a Cat 6 router will be capable of making the most of that.

I have recently changed to a Mikrotik Chateau LTE6, as that has enabled me to Cell lock on tower 9326 and achieve CA, achieving download speeds that range from about 20mbs to 50mbs, depending on congestion. I use a Poynting 4G Xpol2 external antenna.
 
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I did try pointing my external antenna towards the South Bank of the Humber and Grimsby, but got no joy. I suspect the towers over there are directing there signals towards the populace on that side and not sending signals northwards. Highlighting tower cells, suggests that is where they focus. (Experts may correct me that this is not how towers work!).

If you go on to Cellmapper, pan and zoom in to your area, select a provider using the drop down menu on the left, and then click on a mast that shows in the map, a window will pop up with lots of information.

In amongst this is the direction in which each of the sector antennas on that mast face. Typically, a sector antenna will have a beam width of 65°, although there will still be marginal coverage outside that 65° sector.

It's fairly easy to then use this information to see which antenna for each operator covers your area and to then use this to select the cell to lock to (assuming cell locking gives a benefit). As an example, here's a sketch I did showing the two EE sector antennas on our nearest mast, and where they point relative to our home. One is band 20, the other is band 3:

Coverage plot.webp
 
I thought I'd drop in a quick follow-up in case it's helpful to anyone:

I installed the aerials a few months ago now, but could only get my hands on a short pair of steps so couldn't use the full height of my new pole (oo err, missus, etc).

I got a full length ladder and went back up this weekend and thought I'd try and optimise the angle toward the mast, which a bit of high school trigonometry told me was 330°.

There's a copse of trees that I still wasn't high enough to go 'over' and I know there's another antenna more North, so once I got the maximum height I played around with the angle and monitored the signal RSRP in the router's admin interface.

I ended up back at more like 334° and a steady signal at around -79 which gives me ~20MBps up/down, with some fluctuations in speed where there's noticeable reductions in video quality when streaming, for example. I'd love to know how to stabilise.

It's been a windy weekend and right now we're in the middle of a windy rain storm, and the signal is still excellent/good.



IMG_3045.webp

Does anyone know which number to look for in my NR5103E's cellular info page to find out exactly which mast I'm connected to? I've tried searching for a few things off the screen below on cellmapper.net but I'm drawing a blank.

IMG_3061.webp

Thanks for all the guidance, I would've been stuck with that bloody TP-Link shambles of a set up I started with otherwise :)
 
Looking at the picture, my first thought was “Is the mast in orbit?”. Then I realised it’s just the camera angle.
 
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Resurrecting my thread ... I've got a consistently an 'excellent' signal of around -79 on my lovely NR105E (despite the coastal winds' best efforts to bash my aerial around). However, the lag is getting worse and worse and is making it impossible to stream or even view a short video on social media.

I'm connected to Cell 120 here (shown in blue in the attached image, I'm at X marks the spot in red) over GiffGaff. The o2 coverage checker says that this cell is 'busy' so I'm guessing it's oversubscribed and the issue is the upstream?

I wondered if there's anything I can do from a config point of view to improve things on my NR105E?


The other thing I'm thinking about is that my 1pMobile connection on my iPhone isn't laggy at all (though doesn't have as strong of a signal because it's not got a great whacking antenna on the roof, so it's understandable).

Looking at the cell info on my phone (below) from the PLMN of 23430 it looks like I'm connected to a mast at the same location albeit on EE which has a number of different cells (though I can't, for the life of me, find the CellID that my iPhone gives me on CellMapper).

Is the easiest solution just to bash a 1pMobile SIM in my NR105E?










Screenshot 2024-10-06 at 11.22.48.webp



IMG_4446.webp
 
Yes. Then re-align the antenna for best signal strength/quality on the required cell.

Well, this is interesting.

i put my 1pMobile SIM in yesterday and the difference is night and day better. I've got NR5G-NSA, and have seen up to 70Mbps down, although the mast I'm connected to must still be quite contended as it there's quite a lot of variance (thought it's never been as low/as unusable as GiffGaff/o2).

My signal strength is slightly worse in the -86 to -91 range (I'm connected to the same mast (2km away) with my aerial pointing the same way. I tried the router on pure 5G which gave me nothing at all, but still, a huge improvement over the last week I was here using GiffGaff (who, to be fair, have given me a refund as they acknowledge the mast 'is busy'). X marks my location - as you can see according to CellMapper I'm apparently just outside of the cell.

CaravanCellCloseUp.webp



I don't know enough about the difference between NR5G-NSA and 'proper 5G' but my iPhone shows full 5G and two bars of signal, so that got me thinking if I could do any better with a different mast.

My iPhone is connected to a different mast (22061) which is 5km away, as the crow flies and I'm apparently a bit of a distance away from. The cell is the sliver in blue (Cell 1 PCI 437) and I'm the red X. Cellmapper reckons this has a Max / Avg DL Speed of 249 Mbps / 229 Mbps (compared to my current cell's 23/23Mbps)

iPhoneCell.webp


My Iska P-60 is currently pointed about 330° NW towards the original mast, and the cell that my iPhone is connected to is 314° NW.

My iPhone currently has a signal of -112dB and a quick speedtest over cellular gives me a sluggish 8Mbps down/4Mbps up (compared to the Caravan's NR5103 42/24Mbps at time of writing).


Which mast do you think I'm better off with? The current one or the one that's further away with potentially faster speeds? I might need to borrow my neighbour's big ladder again....
 
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Looking at the antenna details the beamwidth is about 44 degrees so aiming from your red x to the 22061 mast should also pick up the nearer 17532 mast as they are not far from inline.
Borrow the ladders and try.
1mobile are way better than Giffgaff so that sim was a good choice.
 
Looking at the antenna details the beamwidth is about 44 degrees so aiming from your red x to the 22061 mast should also pick up the nearer 17532 mast as they are not far from inline.
Borrow the ladders and try.
1mobile are way better than Giffgaff so that sim was a good choice.

Turns out my high school trigonometry isn't all that it cracked up to be, but it's worked out pretty well:

I ended up nearer an azimuth of 300° which got me a brilliant signal and really good speed from a mast over 11Km away!

A quick speedtest gives me 102Mbps down and 70Mb up which I'm pretty happy with. The only question now is how reliable it'll be.

Screenshot 2024-10-14 at 12.48.10.webp
 
@dan_m2k There is a great javascript utility available for the Zyxel NR5103 made by MioNonno who is the Italian maestro of all things mobile router.

Take a look at MioNonno Zyxel Page

Click on the 'Apri' (Open if you use translate) half way down next to Hack </> and it gives you a pop-up box containing a snippet of Javascript which you copy and paste as a new web shortcut URL. This is a script that injects additional code which adds useful details and info
  1. Login to your router web page normally then
  2. Once logged in click on the shortcut containing the script (or you can paste it into the F12 developer console window if you are using Chrome)
  3. script overlays a load of additional cell and signal information, CA status and scrolling signal bars at the top of the page
  4. enjoy the info and use the signal bars to fine-tune your alignment
  5. if you logout just repeat the above
In some of the photos on the bottom of MioNonno's 5103 site you can see what the additional script looks like!

I have been using it happily on my Three branded Zyxel NR5103E, super useful!
 
@dan_m2k There is a great javascript utility available for the Zyxel NR5103 made by MioNonno who is the Italian maestro of all things mobile router.

Take a look at MioNonno Zyxel Page

Click on the 'Apri' (Open if you use translate) half way down next to Hack </> and it gives you a pop-up box containing a snippet of Javascript which you copy and paste as a new web shortcut URL. This is a script that injects additional code which adds useful details and info
  1. Login to your router web page normally then
  2. Once logged in click on the shortcut containing the script (or you can paste it into the F12 developer console window if you are using Chrome)
  3. script overlays a load of additional cell and signal information, CA status and scrolling signal bars at the top of the page
  4. enjoy the info and use the signal bars to fine-tune your alignment
  5. if you logout just repeat the above
In some of the photos on the bottom of MioNonno's 5103 site you can see what the additional script looks like!

I have been using it happily on my Three branded Zyxel NR5103E, super useful!
That’s cool! I’ve had a play and it’s a bit more detailed than the signal graph on the accompanying app.

Still pretty pleased with the signal, we had rain storms this last weekend, and it fell back to 4G but still a pretty decent data rate. I guess I was expecting it to be a lot more susceptible to weather given the distance it’s covering.
 
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