[SOLVED] MIMO technology and Aftermarket Antennas question

icyulkn

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I bought an aftermarket Alfa APA-M25 antenna to replace one of the antennas on my C2300 that has MIMO technology. Did I need to buy an antenna that supports MIMO technology? Does it even matter?

I actually bought two of the mentioned above antennas. Will I be able to utilize MIMO technology this way if I attach one or two of the aftermarket antennas? Or do I need to have all three of the original antennas attached?
 
Solution
The signals go through the antenna. Why even have antenna at all if the radios didn't use them.

So I can just remove antenna and it will have no affect at all on the bandwidth.

That is just stupid...or more likely they are being overly simplistic.

The whole concept of mimo is transmitting multiple signals. They are transmitted from the different antennas. So if I have 3 antenna I transmit 1/3 the data on each and hope the remote station can somehow receive all the signals and put it back together. If you have directional antenna on some of the feeds the remote device is not going to get all 3 or in best cases they will be at different levels. It is already a huge challenge for equipment to make mimo work since...
Just replacing the antenna with larger omni directional antenna can affect the mimo. It is very picky about antenna spacing to get optimum performance. There are guys who whole career is antenna design that decide thing like the distance between antenna.

With directional antenna is gets extremely hard to get mimo to work. Because the signals are transmitted in tight beams it reduce the ability to of the signals to not interfere. Generally if you buy a mimo directional antenna they put one with horizontal and one with vertical signals. I am not sure if they can do three.

In any case you pretty much are going to lose the mimo ability with those antennas.

Pretty much the days of messing with antenna on routers are long gone.
 

icyulkn

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Mar 4, 2019
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Thanks for your replay. I
Just replacing the antenna with larger omni directional antenna can affect the mimo. It is very picky about antenna spacing to get optimum performance. There are guys who whole career is antenna design that decide thing like the distance between antenna.

With directional antenna is gets extremely hard to get mimo to work. Because the signals are transmitted in tight beams it reduce the ability to of the signals to not interfere. Generally if you buy a mimo directional antenna they put one with horizontal and one with vertical signals. I am not sure if they can do three.

In any case you pretty much are going to lose the mimo ability with those antennas.

Pretty much the days of messing with antenna on routers are long gone.


I received this from someone working at TP-Link:

"Hello, the MIMO technology has nothing to do with antenna, and generally speaking, it is suggested to place all the 3 antennas together.

Otherwise, please use the original antennas.

May it help. Good day."

He says it doesn't have anything to do with the antenna. Is that correct?
 
The signals go through the antenna. Why even have antenna at all if the radios didn't use them.

So I can just remove antenna and it will have no affect at all on the bandwidth.

That is just stupid...or more likely they are being overly simplistic.

The whole concept of mimo is transmitting multiple signals. They are transmitted from the different antennas. So if I have 3 antenna I transmit 1/3 the data on each and hope the remote station can somehow receive all the signals and put it back together. If you have directional antenna on some of the feeds the remote device is not going to get all 3 or in best cases they will be at different levels. It is already a huge challenge for equipment to make mimo work since the signals are bouncing off walls etc and causing delays between the feeds.

You can spend hours reading about how mimo works it is so complex.
 
Solution