Long distance LTE

[matbic]

I have a Pepwave transit duo pro router with two omnidirectional LTE antennas (Poynting MIMO 7-in-1) I decided to use two of them to keep each modem in a separate antenna separated across the back of my van.

Our first priority was internet when moving for navigation, video calls, email etc. so I made this investment first.
I use their Speed Fusion service to bond the two modems together and also connect to my home LAN. It is a very good setup.

It works just great, way better than I expected - with a careful selection of SIM/eSIM cards I have managed to stay on line 99.6% of the time while travelling through Europe and Scandinavia and this includes when in tunnels and mountains, I only switched it off when on long distance ferries.

Originally I was thinking I would need to get a Starlink for when we were parked up and wanted to watch streaming TV etc. but it does not seem necessary.

Given the power consumption requirements of Starlink and its need to see a lot of open sky I have decided not to go down that route. We don’t like being on EHU and we do like hiding in the shade of as many trees as we can find! This means Starlink is not going to work for us.

So I have a spare WAN Ethernet port on my router. I was thinking it would be useful/interesting to experiment with a directional and high gain antenna to compliment my omnidirectional and lower gain antenna that is ideal when moving. I could set up and point the high gain antenna when stationary to get better latency and bandwidth (latency more important).

I would appreciate any tips on what to get as a very high gain LTE antenna. It seems that there is a need to be careful about which channels such antennas work with.

Also which antenna design is best: dish reflector like Microtik, Yagi, LPDA or Cross Polarised?

Any advice much appreciated!

 

[starquake]

Well the key is really lack of loss in the coax feeding the dish, so I prefer Mikrotik as their router is literally at the dish with a coax inside of sub 10cm. (You'll lose as much to cable as you will to anything). It's really quite simple to setup, I set up mine as 2 vlan, one for management, and one for a pppoe passthrough to the LTE (they don't come configured as this, but it's a noddy job to setup, you just setup the APN and link the APN to being passthrough via PPPOE). Then it appears exactly same as a pppoe unauthenticated external connection to your router, JUST like a fibre connection often is.

Apart from that it's powering the device, and making sure you can get to the device. I turn off all the (default) dhcp stuff on the Mikrotik as it's really not needed and just gets in way.

This way I can have a router with MULTIPLE LTE connections on it, and load balanace them on that router, or prefernce devices which is what I usually do. I have a config where I send the TV sets and firesticks via a single onnection and send all the ipad/pc's via another. Then my brother-in-laws childrens's ipads don't impact the father in law watching Sky.

The other "trick" we've learnt is to make darned sure you turn off bands you won't want to use, like 3g on a 4g device as it stops Three bouncing you onto 3g if they think its' better for you (and they don't know the size of your antenna so frequently get this wrong). Ditto if you have Band3/1/28/32 available, use those BEOFRE enabling band 20, the gain is less on band 20 anyhow.

 

[starquake]

Only thing to bear in mind is I wouldnt' drive around with a LHG on the roof, asking for trouble. The SXT devices will probbaly work but have lower gain and only go to cat6 now, the AHG new ones I've not tried yet!

 

[starquake]

Ref; what you have, bear in mind the Poynting/Panorama antennas are quite similar in gain, but are omni directional. On 4g bands, that means a 9-10Db gain on those verus 18Db on the LHG. As Dbi is exponential curve it should result in more than double the gain on weak signals, and thus potentially double the throughput on a connection if not more given the 30 degree beam versus 360.

Like you have found though prior to using LHG's - even with a SINGLE Poynting, I'm yet to find an elusive campsite even with just carrying an EE and Three Sim where I cannot get enough signal to watch TV. Even in places where everyone is going around swearing holding mobiles in air cursing the lack of signal. The difference from my experience the Mikrotik gear gives is it makes that same rural signal go from 8-10Mbit to 80Mbit assuming there isn't issues, as you can typically pick up band 3 coverage in places where you can only get band 20 on the Poynting.

Persoonally I'd swap the router and add a more complex one with multiple wan ports (something like a Mikrotik but others exist) and learn how to when mutliple antenna are active how to load balance/share and even just direct one device down a specfic link. The best thing you often can do is like I have and send your TV down one, whilst allowing use of others for updates, family stuff, steam updates, ipads etc. I would warn you the config to do this isn't easy - we use routing marks to achieve, and it took me a full DAY of tinkering to get it working as it should. But now the link works, it fails over seamlessly to the other connections when one is disconnected or has failed, but does a specific device failover.

I'd note my exmple works on a 6.X routerOS, I havn't yet migrated it to 7.x for the actual router as the config for it needs to be completely rewritten for that. Happy to send you the config over for it if you interested, but the trick is basically tagging each PPPoe connection with a routing mark, and setting some automation in scripting so that when that link comes up it setups up the mark to enable (if seen) the next hop to be the pppoe connection on routing. Quite hard to explain but if you google the config on the mikrotik forums you'll see exmaples like I can provide you.

 

[starquake]

Worth noting the channels to worry about at moment on Three and EE at least are B3, B1, B28. B30 and B32 are additional downlink, and B20 is very congested. There are some others but to be honest I've only seen them on some cell towers in cities well away from where we usually use campsites. Band 1 and 3 have the best "performance" usually so focusing on gain on these freqencieis is advisable here. Across Europe, you'll need to check which bands each network use as it varys massively annoyingly.

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[matbic]

Well this is very helpful and interesting!

There is a lot here so I will start with what I am most comfortable with and move on to the bits that are not so clear!

I am very comfortable with IP networking and have used Microtik routers and switches in the past so I get what you are suggesting for VLANs and pppoe as the network set up to give you both admin access to the microik antena and also make it look like an internet connection for the router.

I also think I understand roughly what you are saying about ”tagging” packets in the router so you can send them out of different internet connections and you have rules that make those decisions based on I guess the source address on your network and the condition of your various internet connections.

All this seems very interesting and although I don’t have a microtek router on my van, the one I do have has this functionality built in as well.

Given the high quality of your reply to my question about LTE I think you would appreciate the router I have chosen. I did consider a microtik they are very reasonable value and absolutely jam packed with features as you know.

I chose this one a Pepwave MAX Transit Duo Pro, basically because my brother who used LTE connections in his business recommended it! I know not very scientific!

However as I have been using it for a while now I have really started to appreciate it! It’s definitely not a simple consumer grade device so has taken a while to set up correctly. It uses slightly different terminology but I can configure which LAN devices use which WAN connection and can bring interfaces up and down based on various criterion packet loss, latency etc.

The absolute clincher feature for me is what they call Speed Fusion a clever feature that binds all the internet connections in to one single link. This adds the bandwidth of each connection in to one. You have various options to improve latency, reduce packet loss or provide a single link that is the sum bandwidth of the individual links. There is of corse an overhead so you don’t get all of it.

They let you have some free software to load up on a server at your home that can terminate your internet traffic - this gets you access to the home LAN security cameras, file servers etc. but also lets your streaming service think you are at home while travelling.

I will try your suggestions when I get a microtik and set it up as a third link on my pepwave.

Up to now I have just let the modems chose from all bands available l. It sounds like I should be restricting them to get the best performing ones.

I am still finding my way through which bands to enable. Is there good introduction to which bands are best performance? Or any general rules about which to go for? I guess lower frequencies are generally longer range but slower data speeds? Or is it a case of trying them all?

I was not sure which is the microtik to go for is it the “LHG LTE18 kit”? You mentioned a new AHG model but could not find it on their website.

Thanks for all the useful information.

 

[starquake]

Up to now I have just let the modems chose from all bands available l. It sounds like I should be restricting them to get the best performing ones.

I was not sure which is the microtik to go for is it the “LHG LTE18 kit”? You mentioned a new AHG model but could not find it on their website.

Thanks for all the useful information.

Yeah the ATL (I got name wrong) I think it is is the new SXT model (it's a similar antenna, but has the LTE18 internals with more mimo channels than even a LHG). LHG LTE18 kit is the best LHG avaialble at moment for long hops. I have to admit not owning a live one for my own networks yet, as they only really became avaialble last summer, after I had needed to install 2 LHG LTE6 kits... because their kit was sold out even from their main (master) distributors at time. My first LTE18 will go on roof in ~ 2 months replacing an original rb11e-LHG (ie the first gen cat4 LHG) - which I have several of in service. Given the difficulty in roof access needing a cherry picker I can't just swap stuff quikly at one location. The cat6 LHG is amazing.

UK distributer for Mikrotik is linitx.com -> they are actually down the road from where I live so I can usually get kit same day.

MikroTik LTE / 4G / 5G

MikroTik LTE / 4G / 5G Products. Expert Advice. UK Store. wAP LTE Access Points, miniPCIe LTE 3G / 4G Cards, LtAP Mini LTE, SXT LTE Kit, LHG LTE.

linitx.com

^ is their entire LTE range, in stock from UK next day with free shipping.

Ref; band support, if you can receive reliable band 1/band 3 on a LHG you are best to disable 3g and band 20 (unless these are only bands you receive). You can leave band 28 on (on devices supporting) as it's faster than band 20 these days. Way I run my LHG's is to disable the "slow" paths things get stuck on and leave all the other frequencys active. Read up on cell lock in the Mikrotik wiki and forums, as you may need it... I tend to run without it, but use it whilst aligning antennas (it stops the antenna just moving to another cell when you moving it for your target). Three sims in UK tends to stay stable for months at a time once tuned, EE is very annoying and tend to randomly disconnect you about once every 2 days.

 

[starquake]

Oh only other thing is I'm a bit wary of automagic line bonding like the pepwave does -> can result in out of order packets majorly slowing down both connections from what they would otherwise be capable of.

It's a good product, I've not used it personally, but have used similar semi-pripriatary bonding techniques in work and elsewhere -> usually you best off with weighted round robin load shares (mikrotik has a varient of this in 7.x), but as said, we find particuarly with mobile where performance can differ one minute to the next it's just easier to move tv's to a sperate link to ipads and other non-interactive things that tend to update when on charge, or upload photoes (as iphones do) etc etc. By putting all TV's on static allocations (IP addresses) which is trivial, we can use those addresses to form a "tag" and use the tag for routing decisions. Its simpler to maintain, the tricky piece is having a lower preference route so in event your main link goes down, it fails over to the other one. You also in Mikrotiks need to script something so that if the LTE connection goes down so does the routes using that as primary (you can google that, but there are a few ways to achieve that, but using pppoe is easiest as if the pppoe link goes down your mobile signal is not connected).

Bear in mind in above though that I (have) worked with very large file uploads needing reliability over anything, and the bonding above is what killed upload performance for a client doing that.

Be interested how it works for you, I have zero doubts a Mikrotike LHG can get signal in places where nothing else works, because, well thats what it does! It gets you band 3 coverage in places a handset has band 20 (if that at all), and thats what allows the good performance. Worth noting if you use Voda or O2 sims the bands used differ slightly as their "distance" band is not band 20, its the old 900mhz cell coverage, forget the band number).

 

[matbic]

This is all super helpful! I will get a dish/router and start experimenting!

I know bonding in the past was a big disappointment but Pepwave have done a fantastic job with their version. It’s used very widely in the broadcast industry and is highly optimised for low bandwidth links such as LTE - now they have also become a business partner with Starlink so it is also working well with satellite links - the combination LTE/Starlink is apparently very effective.

Their approach gives you various options to prioritise latency or packet loss - getting packets in order is obviously a main goal of the system.

There website suffers from way too much marketing “gloss” (especially if you like the highly technical Microtik style!) but the actual technology is very well designed and tested. Here is a still rather glossy introduction.

Forward Error Correction has been the key to getting great streaming performance on TV. It’s incredibly useful and this has clearly come from its use in the broadcast industries. It uses some bandwidth to directly correct lost packets and so reduces the amount of IP retransmission.

I have found WAN smoothing is usually unnecessary it also really needs many more LTE connections as it consumes lots of the available bandwidth. I was wondering if adding the long distance antenna might give me enough bandwidth to use WAN smoothing this will be a goal of my experiments. This is more brute force it sends packets more than once and reassembles the stream from what arrives down each link.

The other very useful feature of Pepwave is the outbound routing based on link performance - there a a ton of useful strategies available - including my favourite at the moment - at the start of a new connection session the router sends packets through both LTE links first one to respond becomes the link for rest of that session. But I have noticed a connection can get a bit stuck on one link if we are travelling quickly - so might need one strategy when moving and another when stationary.

Once set up - I have been able to obtain fantastic internet connections with it. I am sure adding an additional LTE antenna when parked will be really useful.

At the moment I target a minimum of arround 20Mbit/sec download speeds but with 0 packet loss and low jitter. This is easy/trivial to do with 2 omni LTE antennas and speed fusion. It’s also low power and does not need to have a clear view of the sky.

The long range antenna will be an interesting addition.

 

[matbic]

So another question!

What are the questions I should be asking when deciding between Microtik LHG LTE18 kit vs ATL LTE18 kit?

This is how I was thinking - please can you correct me if I am going wrong!

1) MIMO above 2x2 is not really that important when in very rural situation as there are few nice reflections to bounce off. So LHG is going to be as good on that count as ATL.

2) I am therefore just interested in gain at the lower frequencies as these are most like to be found at a good distance from cell mast. So looking at lower frequency gain is most important.

Should I be considering anything else?

I can’t find any details on the gain of LHG and ATL at lower frequencies. Do you know where I can find some?

Thanks!

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[starquake]

So another question!

What are the questions I should be asking when deciding between Microtik LHG LTE18 kit vs ATL LTE18 kit?

This is how I was thinking - please can you correct me if I am going wrong!

1) MIMO above 2x2 is not really that important when in very rural situation as there are few nice reflections to bounce off. So LHG is going to be as good on that count as ATL.

2) I am therefore just interested in gain at the lower frequencies as these are most like to be found at a good distance from cell mast. So looking at lower frequency gain is most important.

Should I be considering anything else?

I can’t find any details on the gain of LHG and ATL at lower frequencies. Do you know where I can find some?

Thanks!

Wierdly you want the gain at the higher frequencies, as you can in my case pull in band 1 (2100mhz) from Driffield from south of Bridlington. Three is wierd as the most badnwith is on band 3 and band 1 (and a little bit on band 28 and 30) .. band 20 on three is MUST avoid as mentioned (lower frequency, but used by handsets), where band 28 isn't supported on most handsets, so when the tower operates it, it's super fast .... for data. (B28 = lower than band 20 too as its 700mhz, so lower and wider!).

Band 1 is for Three the "old" effective 3g signal, so it's also due for an increase as they turn 3g off (they'll use this for 4g as well!).

I think the Linitx specs somewhere has the gain per band, but in summary it's like panorama ants just bigger at the higher frequencies, so 4/5g > 1800mhz it's a whopping 18dbi of gain. Where at ~ 700 it's a directional 10-12dbi I think I read

You are right on mimo count as it'll only bond 2 frequencies. I mentioned the ATL as if you are within a mile of a 4/5g cell the ATL would probably be quicker. LHG is more about punching a signal past the current town to the one beyond.

Using cellmapper you can actually see where the cells you picking up are (by the ID's) so you may also find you pickup cells further than you think. From below Brid coast, we can pickup cells on east side of bridlington over the sea (instead of the west side ones that look neaest site to site), as going over the sea there is less "stuff" to get in way.

 

[Carpmart]

Good discussion chaps!

I solved all my issues with Starlink and solar, a happy combination that means we avoid trees for the mutual benefit of the solar and Starlink.

 

[matbic]

Thanks - LGH it is then!

 

[LostInSpace]

Good discussion chaps!

Even if most it went clean over my head.

But I do like a challenge.

 

[starquake]

Good discussion chaps!

I solved all my issues with Starlink and solar, a happy combination that means we avoid trees for the mutual benefit of the solar and Starlink.

I'm still yet to find the combination of a rural campsite, and the inability to stream TV on the 4g we have now. This discussion was more about getting reliable internet in very rural places at less cost per month or to another cell tower other than the local one. LHG and similar offer similar speeds to starlink if you can get line of sight or similar to a town up to 10 miles away.

I'm equally convinced at some point we too will join starlink (maybe for a proper EU/Morocco tour), but for where we use our LHG antenna (we have multiple) it's not the only option given 4/5g is plentyful and fast if you using right towers. We use LHG more for static installs, I'd only take one for motorhome if I was staying somewhere > 5 days and it was a known awful area as it is not the simplest device to get "best" results out of. Biggest issue with Starlink is the need for a lot more solar for us!

The most amusing thing last weekend was the owners forum at the in laws atatic campsite saying "No cell service in area until 27/5 as EE, Voda and O2 are ALL upgrading the cell towers for 5g and have taken out the local cell tower areas for maintance until that time". Everyone on site withotu a (directional) roof antenna was basically "complaining" to the campsite owners -> and there were zero card payments at the pub happening on site (as these apparently used O2 on 2g) for a full week... including the Leeds playoff game.
The funny thing was the service on the LHG was better as less "local" interference from the local towers it seeemed. (speedtests of > 250Mbit, as everyone gone home I guess!).

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[VXman]

I have a Pepwave transit duo pro router with two omnidirectional LTE antennas (Poynting MIMO 7-in-1) I decided to use two of them to keep each modem in a separate antenna separated across the back of my van.

Our first priority was internet when moving for navigation, video calls, email etc. so I made this investment first.
I use their Speed Fusion service to bond the two modems together and also connect to my home LAN. It is a very good setup.

It works just great, way better than I expected - with a careful selection of SIM/eSIM cards I have managed to stay on line 99.6% of the time while travelling through Europe and Scandinavia and this includes when in tunnels and mountains, I only switched it off when on long distance ferries.

Originally I was thinking I would need to get a Starlink for when we were parked up and wanted to watch streaming TV etc. but it does not seem necessary.

Given the power consumption requirements of Starlink and its need to see a lot of open sky I have decided not to go down that route. We don’t like being on EHU and we do like hiding in the shade of as many trees as we can find! This means Starlink is not going to work for us.

So I have a spare WAN Ethernet port on my router. I was thinking it would be useful/interesting to experiment with a directional and high gain antenna to compliment my omnidirectional and lower gain antenna that is ideal when moving. I could set up and point the high gain antenna when stationary to get better latency and bandwidth (latency more important).

I would appreciate any tips on what to get as a very high gain LTE antenna. It seems that there is a need to be careful about which channels such antennas work with.

Also which antenna design is best: dish reflector like Microtik, Yagi, LPDA or Cross Polarised?

Any advice much appreciated!

Hotspot an old phone - mine works brilliantly and only cost £30.

 

[starquake]

Hotspot an old phone - mine works brilliantly and only cost £30.

Haha lol, I think more than a few people at the inlaws static site would disagree with this over last week with the local outage until 27/5.
Honestly facebook was full of fuming people "ruined my weekend" it was hilarious.