Assembling and Installing a Grid Antenna – Part 3

Testing

This test was performed using no antenna, a 1.9 GHz 12 dBi flat panel antenna, and the 2.4 GHz 24 dBi grid.

Both antennas have the exact same length of LMR400 cable and are located on the same mast on my roof.

grid-panel combo

Both have been pointed using a Sprint Mogul PPC6800 cell phone placed in field test mode:

Screen02

The antennas were then connected to a Franklin Wireless CDU-680 USB modem operating on Sprint’s network with EVDO RevA

cdu680

No router was used. The connection was made directly to a USB port, access was made via the connection manager. I used www.speakeasy.net/speedtest as the testing program and selected New York as the server as that is where I have my Home Agent set.

Operating system is Windows XP Service Pack 3. I used Tweak Test and Dr.TCP first, then the RWIN was set at 65535 with a MTU of 1500 (Vista users do not need this)

TCP

Speed results:

speedtest Signal results:antenna rssi testThe results speak for themselves. Clearly the parabolic grid antenna is superior.

REMINDER: The antenna I am testing here works on 1900 MHz systems. If you need one for 800 MHz it will require a different model - which is available. Read my post on determining frequency.