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philh's avatar
philh
Explorer II
Jan 19, 2020

Cellular Hotspot

Met a full timer who was using OTR Mobile Hot Spot Link. This last trip provided challenges as I was reaching my limit of hotspot on my phone, too many parks wifi is less than desirable, and the constant switching of source for TV and android was getting old.

While I haven't used it camping, I have used it around the house, and went someplace today with my computer, and took the hotspot. Worked like a champ. It's not cheap at $60 per month, but it works well, and the speed is decent. I have 3 out of 5 bars, and speednet checked out at 40mbps
  • Hi Phil,

    What you are seeing is that Mimo has multiple antennas. When you add a booster or single antenna range may increase but throughput may be slower.
  • pianotuna wrote:
    Hi Phil,

    What you are seeing is that Mimo has multiple antennas. When you add a booster or single antenna range may increase but throughput may be slower.

    First one, which is probably a bad example, had two connectors

    2nd was 2 separate antennas. Throughput on one antenna was slightly under no antenna. Two antennas dropped throughput 20%.
  • philh wrote:

    2nd, two whip antennas. Not only did it not improve signal strength, speed test showed a 20% drop in data transfer speed.

    Talked to the smartest electrical engineer I know, he said even with the short (12") coax, the signal loss on that cable may overcome any advantage I might get out of the antenna.


    This.
    I'm not a EE and I'm not an antenna engineer.


    But there's a Youtube nerd I watch regularly that will occasionally test antennas with his gear and a spectrum analyzer.

    It's painfully clear that most attempts to mod ("improve") the antennas on an off-the-shelf piece of gear will likely make things worse.


    I've had two good successes in increasing range. First was to take just the outside antenna that shipped with the Alfa Camp Pro and plug it directly into my laptop. That's a nice outdoor antenna with good dB gain.

    The second was to take a decent Asus router (RT-AC3100) and use it as a range extender. It's pretty good.

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