Banana Pi BPI-R4 Wifi 7 BE14 - Pigtails and Antennas

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4(MT7988)
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And how would you recommend to orient the antennas? Is there also a recommendation? (Eg one horizontal, one vertical, …)

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I purchased the antennas and will post here how they go

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1. MiMo works equally on all radios/bands, which means that the above information about cable and antenna placement on the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radios also applies to the 6 GHz radio.

  • As explained here:

2. The 6 GHz band has worse penetration through walls, objects, floors and ceilings than the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.

  • As explained here:

3. Behfor recommends using the bands in this way and makes a ping comparison between them:

Watch these videos, they show you where to place the wireless router in your home and the best antenna positions for the wireless router:

  1. Where to place the wireless router in your home.

  2. Optimal Positions for Your Router’s Antennas in a Single Story House.

  3. Best Antenna Positions for Wireless Router in a 2-Story House.

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New Taoglas antenna with new rg178 cables

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Old antenna with old cables

Both in direct line of sight 6ghz

Signal strength is also much better than previously, these antennas are really good, quite happy with the purchase

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Now that’s pretty decent improvement. Would you mind posting the signal strength figures?

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Top of the staircase in my house

I’ll get 6Ghz up in a bit

Edit: 6ghz

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Very dramatic difference, thank you.

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Only issue is while the signal is stronger than my isp router i still cant get 5ghz in my weakest room while the ISP one can

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Which tools (Windows, Linux or Android app?) are you using to measure the signal quality?

I’m planning to put the antennas on the outside of the door of the cabinet (drilling some holes, but don’t tell anyone). Reading the above it sounds like the distribution of the antennas is important.

I was thinking about just placing all six of them in a line. • • • • • • Should I alternate the 2.4/5g and 6g in this case?

Another idea could be two lines. One of them for 2.4/5g and the other for 6g.

• • •
• • •

Or some funny circular options, though not sure if that makes sense.

 •  •
•    •
 •  •
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Its wifiman from ubiquity

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this is a great topic and must say one of the advice to flattening the antennas helped a lot with the reach of the phy2 radio … is there a feature to star this topic ?

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yeah flattening helped me out too, but still get blackspots on my xperia weirdly

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I’m also not really understand why we do that.

Sure it is nice to use the same antenna on each connection.

But it feels wrong to use a 3-band capable antenna on a port, which delivers just 6 Ghz.

If someone would argue that this are wifi 7 recommandations. Thats okay … but without it, I’m undecided what antenna to choose …

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Plz can you share the links for these antennas with cables (if its required)

I appreciate if there’s link on AliExpress or international shop

Thank you again

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I bought em from digikey

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Thank you soo much for your buyers guide!

I bought myself 8 Joymax TWX-614XRS3B antennas (6 in the router and 2 in the client), in the 6GHz range I got +4-5dBi, in the 5GHz range +5-6dBi.

I would like to ask for your advice - I decided to buy a 5G modem and the question of antennas is, Chat GPT recommends Taoglas GW.52.A153, they are also in the guide, is this a good solution for 5G Cellular?

I also don’t understand what connector this Taoglas antenna has, SMA Male or SMA Female. Digikey says Male, but all the photos say Female. (I need SMA Female, SMA without pin in antenna)

My results with Joymax TWX (RAX120v2 for reference as a powerful AP)

SUMMARY IN BRIEF:

1 wall without MLO:
2.4 GHz: -38dbm TWX/ -34dbm ALI - I'll double check, terrible result
5GHz: -46dbm TRX/ -52dbm ALI

RAX120v2 -34dbm 2.4GHz/ -44dbm 5GHz

2 walls without MLO
2.4 GHz: -43dbm TWX/ -45dbm ALI
5GHz: -55dbm TRX/ -58dbm ALI

RAX120v2 - -39dbm 2.4GHz/ -56dbm 5GHz

2 walls without MLO on WIndows 11
2.4 GHz: -44dbm TWX/ -48dbm ALI
5GHz: -51dbm TRX/ -60dbm ALI
6GHz: -56dbm TRX/ -60dbm ALI

RAX120v2 - -41dbm 2.4GHz/ -51dbm 5GHz
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Hello, why is the signal range so bad, even 2.4 does not penetrate the wall, as a result, the device with 6 antennas loses to mikrotik hap ac2 without antennas, what is the problem? In standard antennas R4-NIC-BE14? Maybe I connected them according to the wrong scheme? I connected the near ones to the near ones, the far ones to the far ones. I do not believe that even with standard antennas this device should lose to hap ac 2.

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@PentiumB are you by any chance limited to 6/7dBm? If yes have a look at [Banana BPI-R4] all related to MTK-SDK - #442 by Rahzadan - Community Builds, Projects & Packages - OpenWrt Forum or wifi txpower value is very low · Issue #17489 · openwrt/openwrt · GitHub

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Hello. Yes, that’s true, I’m limited to 6/7 dBm. I read a long post on github, but I don’t understand how I could solve this. It talks about some patches, but doesn’t describe the installation process or the finished image. Can you please help me?

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There are several images build by other people in the OpenWRT Forum. Building an image can be very fiddly but there are some instructions there on how to go about it.