It’s been 4 years in a house in a rural area, and I’m now looking for a fourth LTE router. First one was SXT LTE, it just died with no signs on life after two years. At that time ATL LTE18 was out, and, despite an inconvenience, I was very happy to get an upgrade. After one year, ATL was starting to disconnect from the mobile network with “no SIM” error. After reboot it worked for couple of hours and again - “no SIM”. So I sent the faulty unit to service, and bought a new one, because I didn’t want to wait for the repair. Now, another year has passed, and another dead router - this time the LTE interface has disappeared completely.
It is very hard to get on the roof, and they always die in the winter, when there is decent amount of snow and ice. So I’m now thinking of having a MT router inside in a conditioned attic, and only antenna on the roof. Can anyone give me a suggestion for the kit - Router + cable + antenna, to achieve same performance as with ATL?
ps. with any indoor LTE modem I’m getting 5-6Mbit/s MAX, but with ATL LTE18 I’m getting around 300Mbit/s.
Generally speaking the issue with the LTE modem inside and the external antenna is the distance between them.
The loss on the cable between the two is very relevant, so if you can stay within a short length of cable (5 m are already a lot, possibly 3 m or less, the shorter the better) it might be OK, if you need more length it has to be seen. (and don’t even think to crimp the connectors yourself)
The new device could be the Chateau LTE 18 or the Chateau Ax.
The antenna depends on how you are getting the signal (single tower, multiple towers, distance, etc.) usually in low signal areas you want a directional MIMO antenna or two antennas pointed to the cell tower, see this thread: http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/chateau-lte18-ax-what-antenna-ports/179596/1
I have 2m pole on the roof, so the minimum complete cable length could be around 3m. I’m not sure about the number of towers, but with ATL I was getting decent signal only in one direction.
Looking around, it seems, that antennas usually comes with 3 to 5m of coax cable… so I’m assuming that the signal loss in a cable shouldn’t be that big of a problem?
Is this antenna ( https://www.wimo.com/en/lte-5g-diretional-antenna#?769=937 ) and Chateau LTE12 a good match?.
Or can I go with Chateau 5G R16, for future proofing? ( I’m not sure, if you can connect external antennas to this router at all).
Today I wouldn’t buy a device with 16 Mb storage as the space is very tight for updating the OS.
The loss (it depends from the cable) can be up to a whole 1 dbm, more commonly 0.8 or 0.9, which is a lot.
I would bet that (unless it is needed because there is an obstacle in front of it) that the same antenna on the same pole will get more signal if placed at 1 m height with a cable 3 m long than at the top of the pole, 2 m height with a 4 m long cable, but of course it is to be seen.
In that specific model of antenna I am pretty sure however that the 5 m cables that come with it by default have been considered by their engineers to be a good enough compromise between high reception and practical use.
If you can do with 3m cables it would be “better” but if the signal will be enough with 5m, it will be enough .
When it comes to antenna cables, if their length is not excessive (one or two meters won’t make big difference), cable loss will be less than antenna gain, a lot less than wall attenuation … and similar to “plain glass” attenuation (double glass with isolative gas between will have much bigger loss) in case of placing broadband device indoors.
However, if one puts device in place, ideal for mounting external antenna, it’s likely that it won’t be very good for WiFi coverage inside the building. So it’s better to plan for separate broadband router and separate AP.
I don’t need a WiFi AP from Mikrotik. I already have Ubiquiti APs. I was using ATL LTE and SXT LTE devices up till now.
It looks like there is no POE capability on any Chateau devices (?). So that means I will have to use some sort of POE extractor to power the device using DC jack. Overall this does not look like a clean setup It is unfortunate, that Mikrotik does not have a simple Router with LTE/5G card and one 2.5Gbit ethernet with POE.
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It is unfortunate, that Mikrotik does not have a simple Router with LTE/5G card and one 2.5Gbit ethernet with POE.