Huawei E5172As-22 - increase wireless signal

[jporomao]

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  Tu

My router has low wireless signal.
How can I increase the signal?
The router only have connection to an external GSM antenna.

Can I extend another antenna? How do I do?
(see images by balwinder27)

The version of firmware is V200R001C58SP100. Is there a newer version?

 

[bill001g]

You have done more than many people that ask this question.

My guess is that this device has only 2 antenna, one for the wifi and one for the cell network connection. Since it only supports 150mbps on wifi this in a way confirms that it only uses 1 wifi antenna.

Now which antenna is which is a good question that I am not sure how you figure out.

Those flat silver connectors on the white cables are a very standard connectors type, they are used on laptop cards/antenna, but I forget what they are called.

You can get cables that convert from that connector to RPSMA which is what most wifi antenna connect to.

It should be fairly simple to figure out. Disconnect the white cable from the network card and see what signal gets lost. You can then buy a short cable to connect to a external wifi antenna.

Be aware messing with antenna on devices like this is likely somewhat illegal because of how the device is licensed. Not that they enforce those laws very often.

 

[jporomao]

Thanks bill001g.
The board has 2 internal antennas. That's why it has 2 white cables. The big connector is for the cell network connection.
Your answer was helpful. But now I have another problem.
I bought the adapter cable and a wifi antenna, but I have no gain in the signal.
By the way, I even lose my signal because the rooter's internal antenna is off.
Is it because the antenna does not have the power it needs? This antenna needs 1w.
I bought:

 

[bill001g]

It "should" be better. Make sure the connection is tightly connected to that little card. I have always had issues getting those things snapped in tight, then again I think I have big fingers.

The antenna does not technically need power it just concentrates the signals. In theory at least 8db of antenna will increase the signal levels by about 8 times . The internal antenna is likely about 3db so you should at least in theory get 4 times the signal.

This works really good in the math equations but you seldom see antenna make massive differences. That said you should have seen an improvement over the internal antenna.

I had a similar device but it was a tiny battery powered hotspot thing. A external antenna made a small but detectable difference. But my real goal was to connect a directional mobile broadband antenna to increase the cell reception and there was no way to connect it without soldering so that ended that project.

If all else fails it appears it has a LAN port so you could use a AP or another router running as a AP to provide the wifi signals and just turn the wifi off in this device.