5GHz 2x2 model with external replaceable antennas?

Technical Support for Routers
1

I really like AR750S. It’s one of very few GL.iNet models with 5GHz support. It also have a slick and solid look. I’ve been using it in WISP mode using 5GHz on both sides (client and AP).

So far, I have two questions/complaints.

  1. While AR750S has two external antennas, only one of them is used for the 5GHz radio. This limits the 5GHz band for a single spatial stream and a max of 433Mbps tx rate. Further researched showed that the 5GHz radio in AS750S uses the QCA9887 chip, which is only capable of 1x1 anyway.

Question: are there plans (and dates) for a 5GHz 2x2 model?

  1. The external antennas in AR750S are 2dBi Fixed Antennas.

Question: is it be possible to replace them with higher gains antennas? Drilling extra holes in the body of the device is fine with me.
Question: Is there a 5GHz model (current or planned) that comes with detachable/replaceable antennas?

Thanks!

2

Here is the thing: the router is too small for 2x2 5G radio. We tried QCA9886 which will hit up very quickly. So a 2x2 5G wifi device should be much bigger.

So for 2x2 model you can refer to B1300 and S1300.

Then we come to external antennas. We have an industrial model which comes with metal case and all external antennas. It is 2x2 5G as well. It also has two internal PCIe modems. So bigger and industrial and expensive.

3

S1300 is not selling yet in the US. Besides the integrated BLE/Zigbee module, does it have any advantages over B1300?

I got the B1300 from Amazon for now and testing. It’s reaching better speeds than AR750S, but still not as good as I’m getting when connected directly to the public WiFi AP with my phone. I can get around 100Mbps on my phone (5GHz). AR750S was going up to 20Mbps (5GHz) and B1300 reaching about 30Mbps (5GHz). In both tests my laptop was connected via wire to the routers so that I was measuring pure wifi performance of the client mode. I have not yet tested them under load with clients connected on both 2.4 and 5GHz radios. I was hoping a router would perform better than a phone.

I also flashed the latest testing firmware on B1300 - v3.022. Why does it come with the old OpenWRT version 15.05.1?
AR750S had the newer 18.x. one.

Can you please point me to that model? I don’t see it on the website/store/docs. Thanks!

4

Apart from the bluetooth/zigbee board, the S1300 has double the ram, uses the newer IPQ4029 processor and has 8gb internal EMMC apart from the 16mb Flash.

From a wifi standpoint they are the same.

Unfortunately Qualcomm is the one that makes the toolchain for the drivers and so on, so GL is dependent on them to update the toolchain to a newer OpenWRT. Currently for the IPQ40xx family that is stuck on v15.

However, the S1300 will get a new kernel update inline with the other routers (the B1300 also though).

For the industrial router you should contact the sales team, as it is more for businesses that need a custom solution, and isn’t as polished. It is very large, like a rack router.