booster Building satellite dish 4G/LTE signal boosters out of spare parts

[WhiteGoblin]

Introduction:

Sup LTT! I swear every time my buddy finds his way over here we spend a couple days just nerding out to the max. Projects that aren't even on our table just spontaneously happen. This time is no exception, woke up with no intention of screwing around with the LTE modem for this place but now we've built & spent all day testing two different satellite dish based boosters. The only empirical data we could gather through this process was my  modem's status page which gave us Signal Strength in dBm & then a Signal Quality rating as well. Though after a day spent trying all sorts of crazy things, watching those two numbers constantly, and trying to handle this in a scientific manner we've came up with some killer results. Night and day difference! Technically speaking, maybe this is all occurring for reasons we don't properly understand. Though the signal strength/quality gain is hard to argue with & it's noticeably faster for everybody across the network, so I'd call that a win.

 

The Setup:

This location is out in the middle of national forest, the closest cell tower is roughly five miles away. Forget power so everything is ran off generators / batteries. Options for decent internet out here are super limited, I've tried all the satellite internet options available, of which they all suck terrible ass. Finally I got temp phones with all the carriers that had towers around the area & just started speed testing the crap out of them. This worked so well in comparison to anything else I'd tried that I bought MOFI4500-4GXeLTE-V2's for all my locations, got unlimited data plans, and said welcome to the LTE revolution. Now these things are pretty cool they've got lots of neat features & run OpenWRT. As I mentioned in stevenkan's 4G/LTE hotspot thread, their customer service is absolutely terrible, plus their is $40 chinese versions of these exact models out there already. So I don't want to sound like a mofi fanboi even though I have enjoyed using their equipment so far.

 

Previous owners of the property had satellite television & left a dish attached to a cement block outside. Plus I still had a dish left over from trying out satellite internet options, one they never picked up or wanted back. Looking around this morning after having coffee we found this lovely guide; DIY 4G LTE Yagi Antenna in 10 Steps for $10 which was very inspiring. Though I tell you what, I don't have any of that gear, am out in the middle of no where for the holiday weekend, & am not driving the two+ hours back to the closest town to find those parts. Regardless if it's ten bucks or not, time & gas alone says no. So we started thinking what we could do that would have any effect at all. So we used Antenna Search.com to find the exact location of the only tower around & started moving the modem all over the place. Got the ladder out & tried mounting it to the roof on the second floor, sitting it in all the window seals, moving electronics, etc. The signal strength would range from -105 through -110 dBm & the quality would jump around like crazy but generally average from 15-20. Outside the numbers it just lists this generically as "poor signal quality" in the modem status page.

 

So we went out and took the dishes off both the old dish system & the old internet system. The when mounted them to studio lighting & green screen poles. Technically these are from Linco & are their 10ft editions. Not really sure what we were doing we used zip ties as a quick an easy solution to mounting things since we could undo them in a heart beat. We also tried to find other guides on the internet for people who have done this, most of which range widely in quality, generally on the terrible side. Most people that seemed more educated suggested mimicking the distance & angles perfectly from how the dish was originally used so we made sure to attempt that first before moving basically every piece possible into every possible position then watching for a while to see if the signal numbers improved at all. This was a day long process, we didn't want to act to quickly on anything though we also learned A LOT along the way. Whole lot of reinventing the wheel and just being noobs going on as curiosity truly was the name of the day. I kept taking pictures but in low light situations my phone did not do that well, I'll be sure to include them though so everybody can see how we progressed.

 

Interesting Notes:

The smaller television dish is actually a horizontal oval, we kept kidding it was the 16:9 dish. Though it was also more concave then the internet dish. Much lighter and easier to work with that's for sure. The receiver on it actually had three points laid out horizontal that matched the wider surface area of the dish. This turned out to be important later on while we were trying to get the two cellular antennas perfectly aligned for each dish's nuances. On the other hand the internet dish was easily three inches larger on the left and right plus was an actual circle so much wider top to bottom. Though it was almost flat in shape & it was used with a single receiver pointed right at the center of the dish. The weight of this unit actually made it much harder to move around & test, plus when fully extended ten feet into the air it wobbled pretty concernedly. It was so much harder to try and get the antennas aligned on this dish as well, the signal quality through the whole day was just worse no matter what we did, how we mounted things, or prayed to the cellular gods.

 

At the end of the day after slowly testing everything we could in different locations, adding wood blocks to change tilt, you name it. We started to see some pretty common themes that greatly impacted performance & ones that hindered it to laughable conditions. Finishing the day out with the smaller TV dish about five feet off the ground pointing out a glass door. We would also take our cell phones with apps like Network Signal Info & see if we couldn't boost them as well, which we could. So it was a decent second and third device to have around for playing with during the performance verification steps of each stage of what we were trying to do. I asked if he had any comments for this post & he said that he was really surprised with how precise you have to be & how much tiny amounts of movement mattered to overall signal quality. Getting the antennas to work with the dish is moving everything tiny amounts until you hit just the right spot. At that, he also said, it was neat even with the modem's slow status page poll rates you could see almost immediately when you found the sweet spot. Jumping on that point it was amazing to me as well. If you put the whole rig ten feet in the air and slowly worked it down inch by inch you'd find a huge different between say 7'6" and 7'. I didn't really expect that myself given I'd just been screwing these units into the ceilings / walls of places & walking away pretty happy.

 

The Results:

We managed to gain +10 dBm on our signal strength & +10 on the signal quality as well. Though one of the biggest differences is it just doesn't jump around like crazy. It use to spike left and right, no stability. Now it just sits at -98 / -10 with slight changes over time, mainly to the quality rating not the strength. Inside the software this took it from two bars of connectivity at a "poor" rating, to three bars at a "fair" rating. The entire network is considerably snappier & our speed test latency dropped about 25% on average. (from around 100ms to 75ms) Overall for something that cost no money & has no power going to it I'd say that's a massive win. Plus now it's all mobile! I can take this thing with me to other locations. Spin it, raise it, lower it, change it's pitch, completely aim it wherever I need to. Should make finding that sweet spot much easier in the future, plus just knowing WTF we're doing probably helps as well. Was a neat project for the day, sure it could've been done faster but we really wanted to see what would happen if we tested basically every possible outcome.

 

The Winning Idea:

Spoiler

Both Attempts Side By Side:

Spoiler

Zip Tie Mounting FTW:

Spoiler

 

Final Positioning & Working Version:

Spoiler

 

[8uhbbhu8]

OK this is actually really cool  I am seriously considering trying something like this at my lake if I can find our old dishes and get my hands on one of those cheap boosters you mention.

 

These boosters you have seem to have ethernet connections. Are they to another booster inside to transmit the signal or a different purpose? Most I know of use coax for going in between outside and inside. 

[TLDR]

Wow! This is a great post! Thanks for taking the time to write it up for us. 

[WhiteGoblin]

Hey everybody! Just wanted to let anyone who finds this thread know that there is already a follow up thread including video! You can find it buried over in the networking section or to save you some time, right here: Extreme LTE Networking (double yagi) (t-mobile) (band 12)