Router and antenna arrangement for caravan

KjetilK · 2021-06-13T12:50:53.787Z

I’ve had an AR-150-Ext in my caravan with a Wifi-antenna mounted on an extensible pole on the roof for a few years, and it has worked pretty well. I have mostly used it as a repeater, and I have successfully gotten strong signal inside the caravan repeating a signal from an AP 120 meters away, which I think it pretty good.

Recently, I got a Huawei E3372 LTE modem for tethering where no external Wifi is available, and now I’m looking to see if I can find an even more ideal setup.

There are two main things I’m looking for: When the antenna pole is fully extended, the signal inside the caravan is lower (obviously, since the roof antenna gains in the horizontal plane), and so, it would be nice to have two antennas on the router, so I’m open to get a different router. Perhaps it should even have two radios, so the internal signal is on a different channel than the external one, which may have a lot of clients.

The second thing is to get a new external antenna. The Huawei E3372 has two CRC9 antenna connectors, and can use a MIMO antenna that uses these two connectors. So, it would be interesting to have a roof-mounted (i.e. outdoor) antenna with wires with both a SMA connector for the GL router and a dual CRC9 connector for the LTE modem.

I’m open to other suggestions to what I can do too!

alzhao · 2021-06-15T03:44:37.648Z

Antenna for wifi and lte may be different because they may use different frequency. You should also not use one antenna for both wifi and LTE.

AR150-ext has only one antenna and one redio.

AR300M-ext has two antennas and one radio. Maybe you can use this one.

We have dual-band routers but we don’t have all external antennas.

KjetilK · 2021-06-15T09:34:58.755Z

Thanks a lot for the reply!

I am aware that different frequencies are used for Wifi and LTE. In fact, in Norway 800, 1800 og 2600 MHz are used for 4G, and I would need an antenna that is reasonably good at all these frequencies.

I guess I was imprecise when describing this as one antenna, there are products our there that integrate several antennas into one package. Teltonika Networks has an antenna for LTE and Wifi MIMO as well as GPS with five wires. It looks nice, but overkill for my purpose.

Yes, I have considered buying a new GL-AR300M-Ext. Then, I’d keep one of the smaller antennas on one connector and connect the roof antenna to the other, right?

KjetilK · 2021-06-18T14:46:52.840Z

Allright, I ordered a new AR300M-Ext. If anybody have any antenna suggestions, I’m all !

silkweb · 2021-06-18T17:12:21.688Z

Some antenna suggestions here, however I didn’t tested:

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mOxDXPB

another one here:

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mOQxL69

KjetilK · 2021-06-18T22:13:49.220Z

Thanks, I have those kinds of antenna! What I need now is an outdoor antenna package that has both a single SISO Wifi antenna and also MIMO LTE antennas with dual connectors.

elorimer · 2021-06-18T23:20:05.178Z

I’ll be curious how this works out for you. Some years ago I experimented with an external antenna (a cantenna) for a router, and I found that the attenuation of the SMA cable negated any advantage of the cantenna. If I moved the router outside to the 6 inch cantenna wire, it was a significant improvement, but adding a 6 foot wire between the cantenna and the router left me net exactly where I was with the little 2dbi antenna it had.

I had a similar experience on a boat with a highly directional antenna. I had a better experience with a little USB wifi adapter for a PC. Extending the usb cable far enough to have the wifi adapter connected at the 3 inch pigtail of the antenna was better, since the usb cable didn’t have the attenuation problem. I think that is why a lot of the marine wifi setups have POE cables with the router tucked into the antenna base.

Your use case is close to the marine scenario and you might look at those solutions for ideas.

KjetilK · 2024-03-23T19:59:54.284Z

Sorry for the lack of response. I had Omni with 5 dBi that worked pretty well, but it was destroyed by strong winds. I couldn’t find anything similar, so I just got a cheap one from Ali. With that, I had the same experience as you did. Yesterday, I unmounted it, and it turned out that the cable was really sloppy, not properly shielded.

I got a directional antenna that I mounted yesterday. I get a better signal than my phone gets but I’m about to open another thread about measuring Rx.