Question Would a single Yagi or Grid Antenna help on a multi-antenna AP ?

[ElysianChris]

I am working on strengthening my wifi signal from my apartment (3rd floor) to my apartment garage on the ground floor.

I have a Asus 16000 as my main router in the Apt and running a Asus 11000 in AiMesh mode in the garage.

I get signal that clocks in around -80 to -77. I'm trying to see if I can boost this to low 70's - high 60's.
If I add a Yagi or Grid antenna to one or both of the routers, will that help?

I know these routers use beam forming and other tricks amongst their 8 antennas, and I'm not sure if just attaching a single Yagi or Grid antenna would help or maybe actually hurt the signal.

Any advice?

 

[bill001g]

Unless you put them outside where they have direct line of sight it is unclear if it will make any difference ignoring the problem with the mimo/beam forming. Directional antenna are really designed to be used in pairs in outdoor installs.

Hard to say the exact path your signal is taking. Many times the signal does not go directly though a wall or ceiling it might bounce around and say go under doors etc. You can use direction antenna to try to force the signals through stuff but like most radio stuff the abilities of the walls to absorb signal actually increases as you increase the power. So you might get some extra signal to pass through the walls but the walls will also absorb more of the signals it is not a fixed amount they absorb.

Messing with the antenna like this will impact the ability to the router to use mimo. Your point to point connection can only use a single pair and you have removed this pair of antenna for your other device so they might run slower.

If you were to really consider this I would buy a pair of outdoor directional bridges. There is almost no difference in cost between just the antenna and the antenna with the wifi radio bridge hardware in the same case. This would allow this signal without impacting your routers ability to talk to other devices.

I would try to avoid that solution. If you have coax cables in both location you can use MoCA and get close to ethernet speeds. You can also consider powerline networks. On the units with a 1000 or 2000 number you should be able to get near 100mbps which likely is going to be more than you can get trying to blast a wifi signal through the walls. Unfortunately powerline units might not work in all houses but they work in most.