How to Improve my Home Office NightHawk Connection? The simple answer to it is use an external 4G antenna (or a 5G ready external antenna) for your NightHawk M5 router. In this video I’m specifically going to demonstrate using the Netgear NightHawk M5, also known as the Netgear MR5100. But it also applies to all the other NightHawk or Netgear mobile units and it also applies to the Huawei B818 as well as if you have other devices with different connector types that will also be relevant to those although you maybe not need to use the TS9 adapter.
Video transcript:
The demonstration I have today specifically involves the XPOL-2 from Poynting Antennas.
It’s the XPOL-2 v3, a 5G Ready Antenna. Off course it’s also a 4G antenna. I’m going to demonstrate it on a NightHawk M5 as I mentioned earlier, the kit is also usable for the NightHawk M2 and for the M1 as well as the Huawei B818. The kit can be found here
This model that I have here has five meters of cable. You can also get it with 10 m cable or with just the connectors, there are many options.
The other thing that you need specifically for the NightHawk would be TS9 adapters.
I made a video last week where I showed that as well. So the TS9 adapters are the connectors that are needed to connect into your NightHawk. When you have a NightHawk, the nice thing about the M5 of course is that it is a 5G device as well. So that’s obviously an awesome feature but more than that: When you have an iPhone or a smartphone, you don’t have to necessarily rely on the screen on the front to get to the information you need. You can download an app and then you can use the app to connect to the device and see what’s going on. So that’s what I’ll just explain and demonstrate. What I want to do as well is I’ll put it in my little house. So I’m going to put it in the aluminium house and I’m going to shield this completely so that the modem itself is as it is.
Here we will have very little signal coming in and then, when I connect the external antenna through that same connection, you will actually see the external antenna because it only gets a signal through the external antenna, which would be similar to using the device either in a very poor coverage building such as a shed or a metal area or if you’re in a weak signal area. That also means that an external antenna which would be on the roof which would be outside can give you a better signal. That goes then into the actual unit itself so it’s similar to that setup. Let me get the setup going and I’ll show you what we can do
and I test the signal.
Here’s my phone. My wi-fi connection is only through to the Nighthawk itself. So what I have you can see our shop test connected to that.
Then there’s this tool, this app, Netgear Mobile.
That’s the app that you have, log into it, that’s authenticating and that actually gives you more information than what is available on the screen. You’d go to settings. I just downloaded it. Then you need to just make sure that the wi-fi connection of your phone or your device, your iPad or tablet or something, is through the mobile device. So this thing now needs to be connected to the NightHawk on the inside. So what I do is I go to “Network”. my RSRP (my signal) inside that aluminium holder, basically in a tin shed or some weak signal area is as you can see there -102 dBm. RSRQ is -7, the signal to noise is 15 dBm. Let’s do a quick speed test see what we get…
Okay, upload 0.77 not wonderful. So we hope to fix that
Okay, as I say you need the pigtails the other pigtails there’s the actual device just want to open that up so that’s the one that currently had that minus 106. we’re going to fix that you use the two plugs at the bottom there. plug that in just like my video last week carefully. I’m going to close it up again. This is not real, but I know I’m in a good signal area so I have to do something to make it worse so that I can show you the difference because the setup is still the same. The antenna is the same I’m going to feed my cable directly into my antenna: I’ll show you there’s the NightHawk connected to those two pigtails that are inside my actual modem itself. Yes it is in a tin fall yes i am making it worse the problem that the demonstration is the external antenna works and that’s what you would do at home okay let’s see what we have as i say xbox 2 cable connected to those little ts9 pigtails and to my NightHawk M5 that is now in a weak area turn on recording.
let’s see what we have we go back to the night talk mobile app signing in again
settings
advanced info
RSRP -99 RSRQ -10, signal to noise 17 dbm – a little bit better, stronger signal. The signal to noise is significantly better so I would expect a radical improvement so it was minus well not much was about 24 dbm
24 megabits per second download
That’s a huge huge improvement so you can see the signal to noise which is much cleaner is definitely helping us in this case. I can keep on testing I probably will do a few more. If it’s going to work I’ll put that at the end of the credits but other than that that’s what it is. External internal through the cable this is available from us. You can see what you can get to connect it to a device such as the NightHawk M5 and the results you get is definitely a significant improvement. I’m going to change my antenna see if I get a better result. I’ll do that as well but other than that thanks for watching um keep an eye out for the next video.
Keep it simple. Keep it real.