Has the Quectel EC25 arrived?
Yes, arrived late morning and got it fitted and connected to Band 3 only. Sadly no discernible difference grrr! Pretty much exactly the same signal as before.
Is the mast you connect to listed on cellmapper.net?
Point to another mast.
Even when it’s a bit further, signal might be better.
So, in the last couple of days I’ve tried a Vodafone SIM. I can see the mast about 2 miles from my house. Pointed the dish directly towards it. No matter how much tweaking I do I cannot get speeds better than I can get with my mobile phone standing right beside the mikrotik.
Today I did a teardown of the lhg. Was pretty surprised to find a little rust on the routerboard antenna and some rust staining in the housing. Clearly isn’t waterproof!
I can’t see any noticeable damage to the board but would query water damage now.
I have dug out an old Huawei router and a mimo antenna I have. Going to give it a go later to see if signal is any better.
Here are some photos of what I found…
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kxfS7GI5bxO9-Rc8GsMs56m7i1zJ3HIy
That looks like condensation forming on the RF element which has led to rust (judging from the imprint pattern). Moisture ingress is an unfortunate hazard for outdoor units and I’d consider sealing them with a light application of silicone filler just for good measure. If you live in a really humid place then you’re in a battle with the weather. However, I’m not so sure that you’d see such a dramatic loss of signal as a result. My estimations are that the tower has adjusted its power levels and you’re worse off for it. For equipment with N connectors, I’d opt for an application of silicone grease on the contact portion to avoid a scenario where rust prevents you from easily loosening the antenna. Also helps protect the connection from moisture.
One unit was mounted with upside down, means ether cable was UP :). Unit still works and have similar signals like new one. We still use it in our test. Customer have new one.
Unit was full with water after storm in USA.
I think rust not kill signals like we think.
Before and after cleaning. Still works 
Are Vodafone and 3 UK the best options in your area?
Due to change to a new MNO for a specific area, we are changing SIM cards on a whole bunch of LHG’s. However, so far we haven’t been able to swap a single card without disassembling the device because the card holder is not correctly aligned with the card slot. I sincerely hope that Mikrotik will fix this issue in future models as well implementing eSIM. I wouldn’t mind a dual-SIM solution ie eSIM and a regular sim card.
We haven’t located any rust inside the units (so far) but mostly spider webs and nests on the PCB/antenna from insects that managed to nestled through the hole where the network cable enters. This was fixed by using silicone sealing. It ought to exist a rubber seal as standard to prevent this.
On the outside, most of the antennas seemed to be intact but were dirty due to bird droppings.
