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Beamforming & directional antennas

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petewiththemeat

New Around Here
Hello there snb forums members.
Since most wireless routers and access-points for home-use does not utilize/support
zero handover and similar techniques I am thinking of fitting 3 directional antennas
on my R7000 wireless router that I recently bought in order to remove dead spots simply.
This router has some beamforming+ mechanism but not sure which kind, there seems to be
chip-based and antenna based beamforming, so if I replace the 3 stock antennas for
3 dual band directional types or rather 3 5GHz antennas and 3 2,4GHz antennas
should I then disable beamforming for it to work.
Strange questions but these new routers have so many antennas so its hard to know
which is used for what.
Thanks
Peter
 
It is chip based.

As for disabling it, see how it behaves. My instinct would be no, do not disable it. It'll either help things or it should be fairly neutral.

Just keep in mind if you are using directional antennas, any client that is more than single stream is going to see a big hit on performance. Also any multistream client isn't going to see as big an increase in range, as they were already taking advantage of MIMO signal gain increases, and the client/basestation is effectively going to be in SISO mode (unless the directional antennas overlap coverage).
 
Thanks for reply azazel1024, the antennas looks so funky on the R7000 I thougt they were part of the beamforming stuff, anyway
I will order some sma connectors and coax and try to experiment a little with this unit.
 
beamforming is supposed to use narrower beamwidth antennas = greater range due to gain, on top of MIMO gains if any.

I worked a long time with WiMax (802.16e) beamforming base stations - never did work well enough to enable, so we just ran them in sectorized mode (60 deg.). The key is antennas - and they are big to get realistic beamwidth, with steering done by changing phase angles of the signals fed to antennas - phase shifting done at IF, then up-shifted to RF. The WiMax antennas we used were cellular base station sized, in an array, pole top.
 
Thanks for reply azazel1024, the antennas looks so funky on the R7000 I thougt they were part of the beamforming stuff, anyway
I will order some sma connectors and coax and try to experiment a little with this unit.

Pretty sure the R7000 uses RP-SMA, not SMA connectors. Also keep in mind, depending on the coax, you are looking at around 1dB loss per meter for 2.4GHz and 2dB loss per meter for 5GHz. So keep the coax runs as short as possible (for find low loss, like LM-195, which is about .3dB per meter for 2.4GHz and .6dB per meter for 5GHz).
 
and if the antennas are part of a beamforming product... the coaxes must preserve the phase matching between antennas. And that's very strict - degrees per inch (lambda * 0.7 in coax, inches).

US FCC rules require(d) Reverse Polarity or other non-standard (for the time) connectors - apparently FCC's consultant thought it would discourage use of gain antennas.
 
beamforming is supposed to use narrower beamwidth antennas = greater range due to gain, on top of MIMO gains if any.

I worked a long time with WiMax (802.16e) beamforming base stations - never did work well enough to enable, so we just ran them in sectorized mode (60 deg.). The key is antennas - and they are big to get realistic beamwidth, with steering done by changing phase angles of the signals fed to antennas - phase shifting done at IF, then up-shifted to RF. The WiMax antennas we used were cellular base station sized, in an array, pole top.

Long story short - made it work for HC-SDMA (iBurst), working solution for 802.16e/16m and 802.20 (for TDD-NB mode) - backed away a bit, but I've heard they have a working solution for LTE-Advanced... most focused on adaptive antennas on the BS side..
 
Yeah I will try to be accurate when making antennas so to preserve the beanforming feature allthough
it seems a good antenna with better reception is the best thing
 

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