Very low speeds and CINR on the edge of coverage - Outdoor antenna?

[Bamodus]

My aunt lives outside of Austin and doesn't have a lot of options for high speed internet. She's used satellite in the past and is currently running off a Verizon LTE hotspot which works fine (~8mbps on average) but the data limits are becoming a huge problem and she's looking for another option. She's just on the edge of Clear's mobile coverage area according to their map, so I figured it was worth a shot to get her unlimited data.

I had her purchase and activate the new Clear Hub Express and told her to place it upstairs on a windowsill facing South towards the tower for the best luck. It pretty much bounced back and forth between 1 and 2 bars and <1mbps speeds. Too slow. Luckily the hub has an external antenna port so she purchased D-Link's ANT024-0700 as recommended on Clear's site. This didn't seem to help at all, and even resulted in lower signal strength in some spots. I made sure she had the switch flipped on for the modem to use the external antenna instead of the built in one and made sure the antenna was standing vertically and had her try different locations. The best results were outside in her yard where she was getting 6 CINR and -89db RSSI. This resulted in about 1.57mbps, a bit closer to usable speeds, but still not quite there. The highest CINR she reported was 8 which yielded about 2mbps.

She'll be returning the D-Link antenna, but I really want to get this working for her and I am wondering what type of outdoor antennas would be a good match for her needs. She still has a pole outside where the satellite was set up for her old service and I think it'd make a good location for a WiMax antenna. There's even some sort of cable run from that location into the house, though I don't know exactly what type. I'm wondering if an outdoor antenna would give her Clear's advertised average speeds of 3-6mbps, and if possible, could she use the existing cabling to connect it to the Hub Express inside the house.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[thuor]

Hi,
Here is an antenna kit that you can use to get an outdoor antenna for the Clear Hub Express: http://www.rfwel.com/shop/4G-USB-Mod...tenna-Kit.html

The most popular antenna that works for most people is the 18dBi panel antenna.

Most likely the cable that you have will not work. This is 75 Ohm CATV cable applicable for low frequencies <200MHz but for high frequency 2500MHz used for Clear WiMax need 50 Ohm low loss cable included in the kit.

-89dBi RSSI is not too good. The outdoor antenna would improve this and make it much more stable but will not likely give you the signal strength you need for the fastest speed (unless you can get a better signal in the roof).

So simply put if you can test out your modem at the pole location where you will mount the antenna then you can expect the system to perform better than that once you hook up the antenna and run the low-loss cable indoors. The reason i say you will get a better result is because the antenna has a much higher gain than the internal integrated antenna (18dBi vs about 3dBi - and recall dB is a logarithmic scale so this is quite a large difference). But just want to set the right expectation that you're improvement will be correlated to how bad your signal is.

[Bamodus]

Hi,
Here is an antenna kit that you can use to get an outdoor antenna for the Clear Hub Express: http://www.rfwel.com/shop/4G-USB-Mod...tenna-Kit.html

The most popular antenna that works for most people is the 18dBi panel antenna.

Most likely the cable that you have will not work. This is 75 Ohm CATV cable applicable for low frequencies <200MHz but for high frequency 2500MHz used for Clear WiMax need 50 Ohm low loss cable included in the kit.

-89dBi RSSI is not too good. The outdoor antenna would improve this and make it much more stable but will not likely give you the signal strength you need for the fastest speed (unless you can get a better signal in the roof).

So simply put if you can test out your modem at the pole location where you will mount the antenna then you can expect the system to perform better than that once you hook up the antenna and run the low-loss cable indoors. The reason i say you will get a better result is because the antenna has a much higher gain than the internal integrated antenna (18dBi vs about 3dBi - and recall dB is a logarithmic scale so this is quite a large difference). But just want to set the right expectation that you're improvement will be correlated to how bad your signal is.

Thanks for the quick response. I'll have her move the modem to the antenna site and see what type of RSSI she gets out there. As far as the connectors are concerned, I see that the Hub Express is listed as supported, but didn't see it listed in the dropdown under pigtails, which one would be compatible?