Where to point wifi antennas

[olympience]

I'm wondering where I should point the antennas on my PCE-AC88 wifi connector. There's 4 antennas, do I just point them all upwards or towards my router or?

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

Pointing the antennas in different directions just helps to widen it's area of around itself for connecting. Just point them evenly in all directions. or make it like a peacocks feathers. two of them pointing sideways on either side and the two in the middle split apart pointing upward in slight diagonals.

 

[Solandri]

The signal spreads out as a torus (donut shape) from the antenna. Imagine dropping a donut on the antenna. The lobes of the donut (out to the sides if the antenna is pointed straight up) have the strongest signal strength. Straight up/down have almost no signal strength.

http://mpantenna.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/FIGURE-1.png

So if you live in a one-story house, you want all the antennas pointed straight up. If you live in a multi-story house, you may want to tilt a few antennas diagonally or horizontally so the lobes of that donut intersect your other floors.

802.11ac MIMO (which uses signals from multiple antennas simultaneously to increase bandwidth while using the same frequencies) relies on spatial separation between the transmitting antennas (so the signal to your device from each antenna takes different paths and bounces off different obstacles). Their orientation shouldn't affect it much unless your device is getting poor signal strength.

Edit: For receiving devices, the antennas should be oriented as close to parallel as possible with the antennas on your router. It's not necessary, but it helps signal strength of the transmitting and receiving antennas are parallel.