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Putting internal PCB of Zyxel NR5103 in Poynting EPNT-2?

Eagle

Regular Member
Hello , I was wondering , does anyone know if it would it be possible to put the ZyxelNR5103 internal PCB and hook it up to the EPNT-2 from poynting? And what stuff I would need to do it? Would eliminate my cable loss issue as I have a 12 meter run at the minute and losing quite a bit of signal on that. Along with issues with water ingress occasionally.
If anyone happened to know roughly what size the PCB might be , max it can take is
185 x 145 x 45 mm

 
It might fit, you won't know for sure until you open it up. Can't find any pictures of the pcb.
What is your setup now? Do you have a directional antenna?

You have 2 other options:
1 - instead of messing about with this 250 euro antenna, you could sell the Zyxel and get the outdoor model. You won't probably lose/gain any £, but you'll have a model that is actually built to be outside.
2 - Put the current zyxel in a box and place it outside, powering it might be a bit tricky though.
 
I'm in a rather unique situation where I'm about 16km away from the cell tower but I do have LoS as I'm really high up on a mountain. And they have B1,B3,B20,B28 N3 and N78 deployed there. I currently have two LPDA-92's from Poynting with a 7m cable attached to a 5m extension cable to reach my Mikrotik Chateau 5G so there's quite a bit of cable loss.
Signal right now on B1:
Screenshot (14).png

Speed and signal using 4CA pure LTE only
merge_from_ofoct.jpg


Fastest I got on her phone despite weak enough signal was 400-500Mbps

The unique issue I'm referring to has all the details here if interested

In very short detail , Snapdragon X55 devices refuse to actually connect to N3 or N78 despite there being adequate signal , the Chateau reads about -92 RSRP on N3 for a split second but will instantly drop it again.
I've tested Netgear MR5200 , And S20 5G , identical problem.

Probably something to do with the distance from me to the cell tower. But my partners phone has the same mediatek modem as the NR5103. And her phone performs at double-triple the performance compared to my Chateau 5G because the mediatek based modem is able to connect to N3 and N78 without any issue and aggregate with the LTE bands when I hold it up beside the LPDA-92's despite having worse signal.

So my logic was to purchase NR5103 which is MTK750 based and it's arriving next week. And if it does indeed connect like the phone does, I was going to try eliminate the cable loss issue by having an enclosure outside so it'll improve N78 further as it has the majority of the bandwidth at 100 Mhz.
This EPNT-2 thing seemed like a decent solution if all goes well.
 
Last edited:
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Hello , I was wondering , does anyone know if it would it be possible to put the ZyxelNR5103 internal PCB and hook it up to the EPNT-2 from poynting? And what stuff I would need to do it? Would eliminate my cable loss issue as I have a 12 meter run at the minute and losing quite a bit of signal on that. Along with issues with water ingress occasionally.
If anyone happened to know roughly what size the PCB might be , max it can take is
185 x 145 x 45 mm

Very unlikely to fit, IIRC the NR5103 inside has a PCB in the base with a load of tall antenna PCBs plugged into it vertically, hence the shape of the box.
 
Ah, ok, interesting situation.
Re antennas, the EPNT-2 has lower gain than the LPDA-92 (8 vs 11 @ 1800MHz), so the antenna is not better. That said, 8 dBi might just be more than enough, especially as it's 4x4.

What I would try first is to get the router outside and test, try various locations, maybe you won't need an antenna at all, if your wife's phone managed to get 400 Mbps. I am extremely surprised N78, even N3, traveled 16km to your phone though, are you sure there isn't a closer mast with ENDC enabled?

A second thing would be to connect it to the LPDAs, but with a much shorter cable, just temporarily, as a test, see what results you get.

Going back to the alternate router issue, just checked and the outdoor NR7101 model has the MediaTek MT7621AT chipset. This would be a more elegant solution imho rather than mess about with boxes, PCBs and so on.
 
Very unlikely to fit, IIRC the NR5103 inside has a PCB in the base with a load of tall antenna PCBs plugged into it vertically, hence the shape of the box.
If he disconnects the antenna array he will probably end up with something quite flat, at least it was my case when messing with the VN007+ router.
 
Ah, ok, interesting situation.
Re antennas, the EPNT-2 has lower gain than the LPDA-92 (8 vs 11 @ 1800MHz), so the antenna is not better. That said, 8 dBi might just be more than enough, especially as it's 4x4.

What I would try first is to get the router outside and test, try various locations, maybe you won't need an antenna at all, if your wife's phone managed to get 400 Mbps. I am extremely surprised N78, even N3, traveled 16km to your phone though, are you sure there isn't a closer mast with ENDC enabled?

A second thing would be to connect it to the LPDAs, but with a much shorter cable, just temporarily, as a test, see what results you get.

Going back to the alternate router issue, just checked and the outdoor NR7101 model has the MediaTek MT7621AT chipset. This would be a more elegant solution imho rather than mess about with boxes, PCBs and so on.
Yep 110% sure that the only cell tower that I'm physically able to get signal from is that one on an Island roughly 15 or 16km away from me.
All other cell towers are completely blocked by massive mountains and I've tried getting signal in every direction to no avail. I went to the Island as well for testing the masts potential multiple times along with surrounding areas. Pretty rural here , ISP had to confirm which mast I connect to as well so I'm positive. It's impressive I get this speed at all considering the distance. But they do have to cover a lot of area as the mast is already 4km off the coast as it is pointing to the mainland. 😅

The phone in the *#0011# menu gave me around -108 RSRP on N78 at best
but can range up to -116 RSRP and still give 200-300+ Mbps depending where I go with it. I did an experiment before too with a huge 80cm parabolic dish and taped the phone to where the LNB would go and managed to get -88 RSRP on N78 focusing the phone directly at the mast (took a lot of aiming to get that as the beam is very narrow and the wind was bad🤣) and it hit 500Mbps+ easily and upload was much higher. I don't think it'd be practical for a router though as it catches a ton of wind due to it's size but the gain is incredibly good.

The LPDA-92's terminate to an SMA connector , that's a 7m cable without the extension I needed to get it in from the tree to my house.

I'm just wondering what the best solution would be to maximize my signal when I do get the router. My logic was an outdoor enclosure of some description to be able to reduce cable loss as much as possible. I wonder what that NR7101 would be like. Would be a lot less hassle indeed if it worked.
 
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Ah, ok, interesting situation.
Re antennas, the EPNT-2 has lower gain than the LPDA-92 (8 vs 11 @ 1800MHz), so the antenna is not better. That said, 8 dBi might just be more than enough, especially as it's 4x4.

What I would try first is to get the router outside and test, try various locations, maybe you won't need an antenna at all, if your wife's phone managed to get 400 Mbps. I am extremely surprised N78, even N3, traveled 16km to your phone though, are you sure there isn't a closer mast with ENDC enabled?

A second thing would be to connect it to the LPDAs, but with a much shorter cable, just temporarily, as a test, see what results you get.

Going back to the alternate router issue, just checked and the outdoor NR7101 model has the MediaTek MT7621AT chipset. This would be a more elegant solution imho rather than mess about with boxes, PCBs and so on.
NR7101 has a Snapdragon X55, same modem as the Chateau 5G, Quectel RM502
 
Ha! So of those 16km, 4km is water? You're lucky! Water is great for RF, without it the signal would have been much worse.

If you have a parabolic, put the Zyxel in it! :)

But yeah, I mean if it works, think about getting the outdoor version.
 
NR7101 has a Snapdragon X55, same modem as the Chateau 5G, Quectel RM502
Yep, that's the culprit for me , response I got from mikrotik last year , they couldn't figure it out either despite a lot of back and forth. Seems like it's an endless loop trying to register on N78 or N3 with X55 based devices, despite good enough signal.

"Hello,
From the log I can see that the modem is constantly reporting packet service connection to 5G NSA data class, but it is reporting that multiple times every second:
15:50:44 lte,debug lte1 mbim: packet service: attached class: 40 new:
Could you try to lock the lte band to 1 and 3 and check if the issue is the same then? Please attach a new log with this set.
/interface lte set 0 band=1,3
This is some weird behavior that we have not seen before."
 
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Ha! So of those 16km, 4km is water? You're lucky! Water is great for RF, without it the signal would have been much worse.

If you have a parabolic, put the Zyxel in it! :)

But yeah, I mean if it works, think about getting the outdoor version.
Yeah that may be the best option provided it has the mediatek modem I'd need. I have no idea if other types of modems would suffer the same weird issue but I haven't really had any other 5G devices to test
 
Hello , I was wondering , does anyone know if it would it be possible to put the ZyxelNR5103 internal PCB and hook it up to the EPNT-2 from poynting? And what stuff I would need to do it? Would eliminate my cable loss issue as I have a 12 meter run at the minute and losing quite a bit of signal on that. Along with issues with water ingress occasionally.
If anyone happened to know roughly what size the PCB might be , max it can take is
185 x 145 x 45 mm


I think your going to struggle on three counts
- Size of the Routers Internals
- Internal Antenna Configuration
- Heat dissipation and Fan.

The Internals of the Router appear to larger than normal, is it going to all fit?, even if you forget the Outside WiFi side of things for Internet, assuming your run Ethernet only from the Antenna Box, your ideally still need a WiFi connection to the Router as a Main or Fall Back (PC or Ethernet Loss) for Web UI Admin Set Up over WiFi.

The Router does appear to run hot in warm weather, and there have been reports already of the Fans failing or becoming very noisey (a sign of its possibly going to fail) but more to the point how are you going to address Fan Ventilation inside a Sealed Antenna Housing? if you plan to vent it your going to end up Water or Damp ingress inside the Router Components.

The 4 External Antenna Ports on the N5103 are not straight forward they appear to Frequency Band conscious in pairs or 2x2 MiMo, so your need to do some Homework on your Main 5G prefered Freq Band to for best NR Bandwidth Performance, in the ideal World Band n78, if n78 is available then and your ripping the Router apart anyway maybe look at converting for External n78 4x4 MiMo over the Routers External n78 2x2.

You mentioned using Existing Full Band LPDA Aerials, these work well but unless they are properly enclosed, they can fail in two areas, Water and Moisture or even Ice build up across the Horizontal Rails and same again where the Coax Feeder is split and connected to the Rails, without correct compound or sealant the Coax Feeder soaks up the Water / Moisture along the Feeder line, and both of the above senorios will degrade Antenna performance over time.

On the Feeder Length, what Coax are you using, if your up on the Mountain, bare minimum would be a decent Times Microwave 11mm Coax or if the Weather and Cable loss is a problem I might be tempted to go overboard and run some LDF450 / 550 with some decent Connecters, especially if your trying to pull in 3.5ghz.
 
From what I can tell from specsheet of LPDA92's I have the 7m cable that comes with mine is using HDF-195 and the extension cable is a 5m Poynting CAB-093 SMA to female coax cable.

I already had an issue you mention with one of them having some water along the cable and the signal went insanely bad , -98 RSRP on B1 was reduced to -121 RSRP. I got some soft rubber type of tape to cover the extension connection part and sucked the water out of it at the end of the 7m cable and it went back to normal. Has been ok so far for the last year+.

Yeah I've never thought of the fan/heat issue. I just don't have any idea what the optimal solution would be , At least ideally eliminating the cable loss and trying to maximize the signal on N78/N3. I had to do some modifications to the internals of the Chateau 5G as well using some ipx pigtails on the board to get the external antenna setup to work properly for LTE / 5G here. It doesn't have to be this enclosure , just anything else that may work better 😅

Details: https://confusedbird.com/thread-119.html
 
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From what I can tell from specsheet of LPDA92's I have the 7m cable that comes with mine is using HDF-195 and the extension cable is a 5m Poynting CAB-093 SMA to female coax cable.

I already had an issue you mention with one of them having some water along the cable and the signal went insanely bad , -98 RSRP on B1 was reduced to -121 RSRP. I got some soft rubber type of tape to cover the extension connection part and sucked the water out of it at the end of the 7m cable and it went back to normal. Has been ok so far for the last year+.

Yeah I've never thought of the fan/heat issue. I just don't have any idea what the optimal solution would be , At least ideally eliminating the cable loss and trying to maximize the signal on N78/N3. I had to do some modifications to the internals of the Chateau 5G as well using some ipx pigtails on the board to get the external antenna setup to work properly for LTE / 5G here. It doesn't have to be this enclosure , just anything else that may work better 😅

Details: https://confusedbird.com/thread-119.html
If you can access and pull in 4G plus a half decent n78 5G Signal, then that's what I would concentrate on for now and build your system around that, at least until we get some decent NR SA Networks Installed, most current 5G Routers will only support 2 x CA on 5G anyway so your best case scenario for now would be 4G + n78 + n78, where it would make a difference is if you can pull in a decent n78 4x4 MiMo (or even 2x2) but remember CA and MiMo isn't set in stone, you sometimes need a half decent Signal level and Quality for them both to kick in effectively and be stable.

At of interest, what n3 Bandwidth do you get?, Im guessing either 15 or 20mb where as n78 should be either 40 or even 50mb.

Where I live is quite Hilly and Forestry, and although I can acquire 5G n78 from two local Sites the Signal is rubbish, both have Hills in the way, around -110 RSRP on n78, the closer 4G Mast options (about a mile) are better but only provide me with 4G + N28 (700mhz) which at best is just over 100mbs on a good day, in fact I can sometimes do slightly better on 4G Only +CA depending on whether the M25 Motorway is a Car Park today or not.

Now I have one direction where I almost have clear Line of Sight down a Valley, and around 10 Miles away is a Neighbouring Full 4/5G Site (EE B1, B3, B7, n1, n28, n78), crap signal but with the right 5G n78 Antennas and some fuffing around with Band and Cell ID locking I can pull in on 5G n78 (single CA on n78) just over 300mbs on 2x2 MiMo and if the wind is blowing in the right direction around 520mbs on 4x4 MiMo. but the 5G 2x2 Mimo Speed is stable, in fact the only way I got it to be really stable was to reduce and try and switch off all my other options including 4G CA, so Only 1 4G Band, no 4G CA Bands and Band Lock out all the 5G Bands except n78 I ended up with a simple single 4G + n78. the reason I saying all this is sometimes we all think the more CA and Bandwidth we can grab, the better, but its not always the case, sometimes a good single n78 Band of 40mb Bandwidth works better than a mix and mash 5G and 4G CA Bands together.
 
On the mast I connect to Three Ireland seem to use B28 as the anchor band and then aggregate with N78/N3.

They have 100 Mhz bandwidth on their N78 band so when I test beside the mast with good signal I can get around 600-700 Mbps max with around 100 Upload.

N3 is a a refarmed band 3 from LTE (EARFCN 1275) and it's 15 Mhz bandwidth. Three also have another B3 LTE cell (EARFCN 1700) Speed tests with just B28+N3 on my partners phone give me speeds of around 230 down and 70 up (that's from my location beside my antennas)

I'd love to know what kind of speeds I'd get if I can do 5CA like when it briefly connects on the chateau , shame it won't actually register on any 5G band with these X55 based modems for me

dc6ac3c9227823481f8d82d62d612c3adadaf5e1.png
 
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