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Rural - Antenna, B1 & B3 THIS!

It was a just back from the pub late night bid on eBay. I forgot all about it until I got an email five days later saying I’d won. £30 if I remember correctly. Nobody else bid on it.
Free delivery, did it arrive flying? 🤭
 
I measured the elevation angle using some trig and the known heights either end (from the Solwise map tool). The height difference between the centre of the dish at our end and the centreline of the array up the mast is 97m, which gives an elevation angle of only 2.29°. I'm using the 5° spacer that came with the dish at the moment, as there are trees on top of the hill between us and the mast and I think angling it upwards a bit might help.

The beam width of the dish antenna is pretty broad though, even up at B7. Guessing, from the gain figures, I'd say the 3dB beam width of the dish is going to be around 60° or so down in B20, narrowing to maybe 35° in B3. Might get as narrow as around 25° in B7. Still a pretty wide beam though, which does make alignment a bit less critical. Looking at the design the antenna pattern is going to be close to symmetrical in both the vertical and horizontal planes.

Be interesting to see what the performance is like with a bigger dish. Tempted to get the largest satellite TV dish I can find and see if there's a way to adapt the LHG antenna/router unit to work with an offset feed. Can't see any obvious reason for it not to work, and a typical asymmetric satellite TV dish would give a narrower beam in the horizontal place, whilst retaining a reasonably wide vertical pattern, with a useful boost in gain, especially down in B20.
Will you need a prime focus dish for this?

If so, they’re quite rare over here compared to offset.
 
The other prime focus reflector I have used with some success is the TP Link 100cm parabolic. There are cheaper clones.

Chuck away the supplied feed and rig up a mount for whatever you are going to use.

IMG_0726.webp
 
Will you need a prime focus dish for this?

If so, they’re quite rare over here compared to offset.


Not sure, TBH. I can't see any obvious reason why an offset feed shouldn't work, other than that of matching the feed carefully and dealing with the slightly more problematic alignment process in the vertical axis. An offset feed has the big advantage that there are lots of cheap reflectors and mounts around.
 
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I measured the elevation angle using some trig and the known heights either end (from the Solwise map tool). The height difference between the centre of the dish at our end and the centreline of the array up the mast is 97m, which gives an elevation angle of only 2.29°. I'm using the 5° spacer that came with the dish at the moment, as there are trees on top of the hill between us and the mast and I think angling it upwards a bit might help.

The beam width of the dish antenna is pretty broad though, even up at B7. Guessing, from the gain figures, I'd say the 3dB beam width of the dish is going to be around 60° or so down in B20, narrowing to maybe 35° in B3. Might get as narrow as around 25° in B7. Still a pretty wide beam though, which does make alignment a bit less critical. Looking at the design the antenna pattern is going to be close to symmetrical in both the vertical and horizontal planes.

Be interesting to see what the performance is like with a bigger dish. Tempted to get the largest satellite TV dish I can find and see if there's a way to adapt the LHG antenna/router unit to work with an offset feed. Can't see any obvious reason for it not to work, and a typical asymmetric satellite TV dish would give a narrower beam in the horizontal place, whilst retaining a reasonably wide vertical pattern, with a useful boost in gain, especially down in B20.
I was rather surprised just how tolerant the dish is to poor alignment!
 
I was rather surprised just how tolerant the dish is to poor alignment!

Yes, it won't be fussy, given the wide beamwidth. Nowhere near as twitchy as aligning a satellite TV dish, that has a much narrower beamwidth.

I'm seriously toying with the idea of getting the largest satellite TV dish I can find, junking the LNB and seeing if I can knock up a suitable B3 feed for it, perhaps using either the Mikrotik or Telefonica modules, with either a 2x2 or 4x4 MIMO patch antenna feed.

One advantage of B3 (and higher frequencies) is that it's not hard to make feeds at that frequency. A year or so ago I found a way to make 3D printed microwave horn antennas, using self-adhesive copper foil stuck on to pretty accurate 3D prints. Should be easy enough to make either two or four horns sized to illuminate an offset feed dish efficiently. The 10.525GHz horn antenna that I made to improve the performance of a cheap ebay Doppler radar works very well.

Our nearest (and only) mast does have a B3 EE sector antenna pointing pretty much directly at us (it's centered at 063°T, our bearing from the mast is 068°T). If I could connect to that then I'm sure the performance would be better, simply because B3 has more bandwidth per channel than B20.

Only real problem is my wife's tolerance to having yet more carbuncles bolted to the end of the house . . .
 
Use the nperf app and set it to run longer tests.
Alternatively start a speedtest, stop it midway and start again.
The routers need a bit of time and load to aggregate fully the bands.
cheers, nperf on mobile set to 20secs works a treat, seems far more responsive than speedtest.net
 
Yes, it won't be fussy, given the wide beamwidth. Nowhere near as twitchy as aligning a satellite TV dish, that has a much narrower beamwidth.

I'm seriously toying with the idea of getting the largest satellite TV dish I can find, junking the LNB and seeing if I can knock up a suitable B3 feed for it, perhaps using either the Mikrotik or Telefonica modules, with either a 2x2 or 4x4 MIMO patch antenna feed.

One advantage of B3 (and higher frequencies) is that it's not hard to make feeds at that frequency. A year or so ago I found a way to make 3D printed microwave horn antennas, using self-adhesive copper foil stuck on to pretty accurate 3D prints. Should be easy enough to make either two or four horns sized to illuminate an offset feed dish efficiently. The 10.525GHz horn antenna that I made to improve the performance of a cheap ebay Doppler radar works very well.

Our nearest (and only) mast does have a B3 EE sector antenna pointing pretty much directly at us (it's centered at 063°T, our bearing from the mast is 068°T). If I could connect to that then I'm sure the performance would be better, simply because B3 has more bandwidth per channel than B20.

Only real problem is my wife's tolerance to having yet more carbuncles bolted to the end of the house . . .
new wife time? :LOL:
 
One thing I've noticed with the LHGG (in comparison to my omni and tp-link,) the tp-link will bond B3 & B1 (or B3, B3) but, the LHGG will only bond a B3, B3 ?
 
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One thing I've noticed with the LHGG (in comparison to my omni and tp-link,) the tp-link will bond B3 & B1 (or B3, B3) but, the LHGG will only bond a B3, B3 ?
A useful article here: https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=160073&p=787201
and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_aggregation

R11e-LTE6 supports inter-band CA and contiguous intra-band CA.
R11e-LTE6 doesn't support non-contiguous intra-band CA

So my LTE6 should support B1,B3 CA - but why do I never see it, yet I see this on the TP-Link?

update: ah ha: no B1 and B3 support, that's somewhat a shame, boo Mikrotik, first negative. https://i.mt.lv/cdn/product_files/R11e-LTE6_201050.pdf

I have no B5, 8,or a strong enough B20 locally and my mast doesn't appear to support B1,B1 CA, another boo for EE!
1696148684500.png
 
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