3G Directional Antenna

Does anyone use one of these?

http://www.antennasonline.co.uk/products/13/High-Gai...

I bought one & was going have it fitted externally to the house to see if i could get my speed up any. I currently have one of the new 3 high speed dongles & last Saturday was able to achieve 8.99Mbps with it sitting on a baking tray in the lounge. My nearest Cell is under half a mile away as the crow flies, so I get a fairly strong signal anyway.

I have tried this antenna internally in the lounge & upstairs but can't really see any difference.

I asked prior to purchase if it would help & they assured me it would.

I have emailed them asking if I a doing something wrong or if the antenna is faulty but no reply.

The usb dongle is connected to my Draytek 2820VN & from the admin pages I can see the signal strength that the dongle is receiving. This doesn't change by adding the modem mate to the external antenna.

Really looking for some feedback on this. Have even mailed the manufacturer as their reseller isn't replying

When you say high speed dongle do you mean the Huawei E367?

It's is worth pointing out that 21.6Mbps is the theoretical maximum including overheads so you will never see that as an actual throughput speed!

I believe the Huawei E367 uses MIMO antennas so using an external antenna with it will effectively brake its MIMO capability and thus could reduce the speed.

[censored] is wrong with 8.99Mbps - that's amazing for mobile broadband!?

Yes, its the Huawei E367 that I have. I ordered the Antenna before I had the new dongle because i was assured by seller that it would make a difference. I am happy enough with the speeds from the Huawei E367 but not overly impressed with spending just short of £100 on an ext antenna that maybe either faulty or worthless to me.

You spoke to someone in sales ... they didn't have a clue by the sounds of it.

Send the antenna back as "not as described".

Not sure if it was sales or not via email. I have had it for a week & it has been opened to try, can i still send it back ?

You'll have to check that with them. You should be able to if no there is always ebay.

I believe the E367 is capable of 21Mbps and more but the 3 network hasn't been upgraded from 7.6 yet but it will be sometime this year although I'm not sure if they're going for 14 or 21. I think (although I might have misunderstood the wiki) that using the hspa+ standard the speeds are increased by combining signal channels i.e 2x7 or 3x7 via a software upgrade to the control boxes at the 3g antenna site. When installing the E367 in Windows I noticed at least 4 modems being loaded when the drivers were installing, so it's possible that the E367 not only has multiple antenna (MIMO) but multiple modems inside.

I browsed the dongle settings properties in Windows and saw an option to limit the dongle speeds. The highest speed in the list was over 100Mbps. It is a shame the 3 E367 doesn't have an external antenna jack because Huawei show an E367 with an external jack on their website but 3 haven't used that particular model.(unless there is a jack under the cover but I'm not going to try and find out).
If I needed to increase signal with the E367 I'd be tempted to rig up a parabolic dish and reflect the signal onto the dongle and keep the usb connection via a short cable into a router.

If you get a fairly strong signal anyway, external antennas are pretty pointless.
They are only really useful if you get poor signal or struggle to get signal.

I am thinking of getting a set of BT Comtrend 200 MBps adapters to allow me to move the router & dongle upstairs to see if that improves things any.

No feedback from the manufacturer or reseller, very poor show imo. Think I will just stick the stuff on ebay & when I get asked for a review from google checkout i'll just be brutally honest. They messed me about with posting it too

Edited by AlistairS (Mon 18-Apr-11 19:30:58)

You are not going to gain anything. You already have good signal and very good throughput. Just wait a little until three have finished upgrading their network to fully support 21.6Mbps.