Question on proper location for cellular antenna

[damian]

I received a car top antenna yesterday that I bought from you guys, but I didn't really see an improvement in speed or stability with it. It actually seemed faster without the antenna but that may have been a coincidence. Do you have any tips on locating the antenna and how best to handle the extra wire? We did notice a difference in the speed that seemed to have something to do whether we coiled up the extra wire or not.

[noneya]

Hope this helps...

I received a car top antenna yesterday that I bought from you guys, but I didn't really see an improvement in speed or stability with it. It actually seemed faster without the antenna but that may have been a coincidence. Do you have any tips on locating the antenna and how best to handle the extra wire? We did notice a difference in the speed that seemed to have something to do whether we coiled up the extra wire or not.

There's no minimum separation distance required since by plugging in the antenna adapter to the aircard you disable the aircards patch antenna and use the monopole high gain magnet mount antenna. That's an interesting point about the extra wire: I would not think that it would make a difference since the coaxial shielding of the RG58 is such that the RF signals are fully contained within the insulation. As such it would not make a difference how the extra wire was oriented since there is no radiation pattern overlap. Also the WiFi antenna radiates around 2.4GHz and since Sprint uses PCS frequency hand around 1.9GHz there's a lot of spectrum separation so both antennas should theoretically not interfere as well.

[damian]

expected speeds?

The connection goes from very fast to very slow. What sort or low end download speeds should we be seeing with the Sprint connection?

[noneya]

Expected speeds per carrier

The connection goes from very fast to very slow. What sort or low end download speeds should we be seeing with the Sprint connection?

Low end depends on what market you are in. If you are seeing 900kbps consistently it means you are in a RevA market. But then again it depends on whether you are able to consistently receive a strong signal from that RevA tower. This table shows what you should expect:http://www.rfwel.com/data/speed_comp.php

[damian]

Multiple connections?

I've also had trouble with this connection handling simultaneous requests. Checking email while surfing or downloading will bring the connection to a grinding slowdown. My old connection, which was a satellite connection, was horrible and I was hoping that the Sprint EvDO would be able to handle multiple computers and requests much better than the satellite connection. Is this how the service is supposed to be or do we need to look into the external antenna to improve the quality of the service?

[noneya]

Multiple connection with Sprint EvDO concern

I've also had trouble with this connection handling simultaneous requests. Checking email while surfing or downloading will bring the connection to a grinding slowdown. My old connection, which was a satellite connection, was horrible and I was hoping that the Sprint EvDO would be able to handle multiple computers and requests much better than the satellite connection. Is this how the service is supposed to be or do we need to look into the external antenna to improve the quality of the service?

1xEVDO both Rev0 and RevA is capacity limited and QOS is dependent on number of concurrent users. NOTE that both you and your wife using the same aircard through the router are regarded as 1 concurrent users as far as the tower is concerned (only one public IP address)- so the speed should NOT change when both of you are online simultaneously. The only time you would see speed degradation is if the number of people connected to the same tower went up (this is exactly what the problem is with Verizon Wireless). So the question then becomes whether the problem is with the Cellular 3G EVDO side or with the WiFi/LAN network? Are you guys connecting wirelessly to the KR1 or using LAN? If connected wirelessly do you see the datarate go well below 54Mbps at times? If so this might suggest interference in the WiFi side which is not too difficult to correct in most cases. Do me a favor: Connect the aircard directly to the laptop. On the Sprint connection manager click on ?menu? then ?Device info & diagnostics? then tell when what the received signal strength is (should be a negative dBm number). Then repeat the same thing with the antenna connected. (With the antenna you should have a stronger received signal i.e a less negative dBm).

[damian]

Signal strength indicator in the EvDO router

In the router admin under status I'm seeing all of the bars lit up on connection strength and that does not seem to correspond to connection speed. A few times I've only had maybe 3 bars lit (colored dk blue) and the connection has been fast. Other times they are all lit and the connection is running under 100kbps down.

[noneya]

Received signal strength (RSS)

In the router admin under status I'm seeing all of the bars lit up on connection strength and that does not seem to correspond to connection speed. A few times I've only had maybe 3 bars lit (colored dk blue) and the connection has been fast. Other times they are all lit and the connection is running under 100kbps down.

This again suggests that the datarate loss does not seem to be related to Received signal strength (RSS)?

[damian]

Thanks

Thanks again for all your help. This is a big improvement over the Alltel connection. I'd like to get it tweaked to the point where I could say goodbye to the satellite connection if possible.

[noneya]

Anytime

Definitely! No problem! Hope we can solve this for you. Thanks for your patience and appreciating the complexity of debugging RF/Networking issues especially remotely. You should not have a problem using EVDO as your primary. We actually have several customers including some corporations that are actually moving to EVDO for their "satellite" offices since a solid 800-900kbps is not bad at all.