Poynting aerial hoax or heaven

[BroadbandBoer]

Living on a farm. Broadband was a figment of my imagination. Bought the 3g hsdpa data card but i'm about 4 km from the nearest 3g coverage. Heard that the poynting aerial boosts reception. Gprs is working fine but i would like 3g. Anybody got any experience.

 

[mancombseepgood]

Ja

Living on a farm. Broadband was a figment of my imagination. Bought the 3g hsdpa data card but i'm about 4 km from the nearest 3g coverage. Heard that the poynting aerial boosts reception. Gprs is working fine but i would like 3g. Anybody got any experience.

I'm also interested in the answer... I have always wondered, since wireless is full duplex and send/receive... how does one aerial help? Or does it assume the remote one must be good as well...?

 

[BroadbandBoer]

Yup. Doesn't make much sense. Tried adsl with two aerials over more than 17km. Worked fine telkom just didn't approve. I'ts illegal to cross a public road.

 

[ajax]

One good outside "aerial" or antenna can make a major difference. The loss of signal from the source to the receiver has 3 primary components, the loss or gain through the transmitting system (antenna), the loss incurred by travelling through the air, also known as free space loss, and the loss at the receiving system (antenna).

Not much you can do about the free space loss, but if you improve the antenna on either side, you will end up with a much better signal. On bi-directional traffic like a wireless connection, the same antenna is used for both sending and receiving. [There is a little gadget in the radio that seperates the transmitting signal from the receiving signal so that there's no mixup. It's called a diplexer]

See it this way, antenna gain basically means the antenna is more sensitive to signals coming from a specific direction and less sensitive to signals from elsewhere. If you are screaming at the top of your voice to someone a block away, the other person will be able to hear you better if he puts his hand around his ear. Then if you do the same, he will hear you even better and vice versa.

An outside antenna with gain may help, Broadbandboer, but it can not be guaranteed until some tests are done.

 

[vodacom3g]

IN summary, a high-gain antenna will help with both transmitting and receiving, mounting a Poynting 7dB antenna outdoors will give you an effective 15dB boost, quite substantial.

I think they also have a 11dB unit, giving you close to 19/20 dB gain. Give them a call, contact details in the FAQ, they might have other units.

 

[BroadbandBoer]

Thanx. Appreciate the help. Location profile updated.

 

[pre-g-user]

I live on a farm too in Magaliesburg. I have the ETSA 3G Aerial Booster which works 100%. I am 8km's from the tower in Magaliesburg and I have a full strength signal, no feedback, no noise. I do not know the Poynting aerial but I can vouch for the ETSA.

Cheers

 

[BroadbandBoer]

Specs?

Thanks. Do you have the db gain specificatons? I'd appreciate any specs. And do you have a contact number or web adress for etsa? Thank you.

 

[Inthedarkages]

Best way to piont the arial

I have already posted a message under the development section. But this thread is much more recent. Is anyone still working on the signal strength meters, as that would make life a hellova easier when trying to piont my ariel, instead of the current hit and miss system i have at the moment.

 

[Phaff]

Does anyone know what frequencies Vodacom use for GPRS?
I have just come from one of our farms where they get 16 kilobits via their telkom line. I tested my notebook with a data card and I was getting peak transfer speeds of up to 273K. I would like to use an external antennae because I can see the Vodacom tower from the farm office.

I dont want to try the whole Poynting antenae route again, they dont have anything in Cape Town so there is no way to test. If I know the frequencies I will sommer make Aerials.

 

[grubsner]

Have a look at some of the Poynting antenna datasheets from their websites. The datasheets contain SWR graphs that indicate SWR vs frequency. Should give you an idea what frequencies to look for.

If you can see the BTS then us a "normal" dual band (900 Mhz/1800 Mhz) vertical antenna. Get them from RFdesign in Midrand.

HTH

 

[ajax]

Does anyone know what frequencies Vodacom use for GPRS?
I have just come from one of our farms where they get 16 kilobits via their telkom line. I tested my notebook with a data card and I was getting peak transfer speeds of up to 273K. I would like to use an external antennae because I can see the Vodacom tower from the farm office.

I dont want to try the whole Poynting antenae route again, they dont have anything in Cape Town so there is no way to test. If I know the frequencies I will sommer make Aerials.

All the mobile operators use the same frequencies for GPRS/EDGE as for voice calls. That will be the GSM 900 and GSM 1800 bands.

You will need a dual band antenna for the P-GSM and DSC 1800 bands as seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_ranges
Why I say you need a dual band, and V3G can correct me on this, is that Vodacom uses both bands. While your phone or card may only see the 900 band carriers (called BCCH's) during the call or data connection the network may switch you over to the 1800 band. Then if your antenna is only optimised for GSM900 you will have a bad connection again.

However, if you have 6630 or 6680 or the like with Netmonitor, you can lock the phone to ONE channel only, i.e. a GSM 900 channel for which there is only 1 downlink frequency and another frequency for uplink in the same band.

 

[nictron]

I can vouch for the 7dBa Poynting antennae, I had problems just connecting to GPRS in North Riding Johannesburg. Put up the antennae and it boosted me to 4 bars! Throughput to the furthest tower (7Km line of sight) is 800kBps. Gaming also works.

On a farm I might go for the 15dBa. Just to be sure! You need line of sight so mount it on a pole!

Hope this helps.

Nictron

 

[ic]

...GPRS...Throughput...800kBps...

800kBytes/s on GPRS? - not even HSDPA is capable of 6400kbits/s [yet]...