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ZTE MF286D external antenna?

I think the left hand port could be made to stretch to port 4 making 2 x mimo by unclipping the cable again I've not tried and my antennas are not with me ATM bunny ears made the signal worse
 
View attachment 7921

I moved port 4 to an external sma not tested yet but read somewhere you can also move port 1 and 5 for 4 x mimo and keep the external ports as they are
That was me most likely.

If memory serves, port 2 goes to the left hand external sma antenna (when looking from the rear) but is only used for high band frequencies.

It would be possible with the right short length connector to connect the left SMA to port 4 from port 5 but I've never seen it done and just made port 4 external like above.
 
Last edited:
Screenshot_20230819_225835_Bromite.webp


Assuming this is correct this is what I was working from
 
I just had a look at cellmapper. It seems that you are stuck with a base station that has 10MHz in each cell (bands 1, 8 and 20). and these cells seem to cover vast areas.
Your web gui shows 20dB SNR, not sure whether that can be improved much by external antennas. How far away are you from the base station?
The fluctuations seem to be down to user numbers rather than signal levels.
 
SNR 20 dB is very good so bottleneck either bandwidth in frequency domain or fronthaul/backhaul.

Signal strength could be better, I guess.
 
Yesterday I came across a really good image of the modem with the 5 ports clearly labelled. Unfortunately, I forgot to save it or bookmark a link to it.
If anyone has seen it and remembers where it is, please post the picture or a link to it?

Thanks
 
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Port 3 is primary low/medium band, port 4 is diversity/MIMO
 
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Yesterday I came across a really good image of the modem with the 5 ports clearly labelled. Unfortunately, I forgot to save it or bookmark a link to it.
If anyone has seen it and remembers where it is, please post the picture or a link to it?

Thanks
Browser history? Cache thumbnails?
 
Browser history? Cache thumbnails?
No luck! Spent over an hour today looking in the browser cache & history but couldn't find it, history shows only this forum. so will look again at some point Thanks for all the suggestions but I'll leave it here & will post if I come across that diagram again.

Not the end of the world, from what I've read here, to get 2x2 MIMO on a single band, I simply need to move the LH antenna lead to port 4 on the modem.
I'm waiting for some header pins to make a neat job of connecting the serial port for the FOTA updates & will look at the antenna / modem connections at the same time.

I'll do some before & after testing plus a comparison with the Sercomm LTE2122GR & post the results.
 
I think I saw this in one of the other MF 286D threads, but thought it might be of interest for anyone wanting an easy way to see graph of signal & band selection. The code is linked below the video, tested fine on my router. The code that's linked also does a bit more than in the video.

 
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The code is linked below the video, tested fine on my router.
can't get that to work on my MF286D (Nordic Firmware).

As far as external antennas are concerned, I got hold of a pair of Coflex 1000 LPDAs and connected one up to the r/h side SMA connector (using B3). Absolutely no improvement of Signal level or SINR - as if there was no external antenna at all.
I need to get another MF286D and then wire up the external antenna directly to the connectors on the modem.
I wonder whether 2x2 MIMO with LPDAs or 4x4 MIMO with the internal antennas works better
 
I've not used the ZTE for a few weeks but am using the Sercomm router for the time being so it's an odd coincidence that this thread should pop up today! I've just been using my ZTE to check the signal strength via that code, I have it loaded into a bookmark. @Essex_Man are you using a Chrome based browser?
 
Works great for me, with "Nordic" as well.
It appears that I have Nordic_MF286D_B12 (TELIA_MF286DV1.0.0B12) although the web UI shows CR_H3GGBMF286DV1.0B04.

How do you run the code?
Created a bookmark "ZTE Hack" and pasted the code into the URL field, then saved bookmark. Logged into router and clicked the bookmark.
Very briefly, I can see some text boxes popping up and then a grey background with an arbitrary three to five digit number.
@Essex_Man are you using a Chrome based browser?
No, Firefox 91.4.0esr

Just tried with Chrome, working now, thanks
 
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