Wilson Electronics Wideband Directional Antenna 700-2700 MHz, 50 Ohm (314411)

Our Verizon signal has recently gotten very weak. The only way we were able to pick up a 4G LTE signal was to have our home router outside - obviously not an optimal solution. The antenna arrived today, installed in about 30-45 minutes. Now the router works happily inside with a better signal strength and SNR than it had outside. I'm going to be that it would not pull in a usable signal if the cell coverage is any worse than marginal but for us it's a great improvement. My only criticism is that the Wilson mounting plate has a single u-bolt connection to the pipe where the antenna itself has the option of two u-bolts which seems far more secure. Time will tell if this is a significant problem.

I have no qualms with the Wilson antenna. It sweeps fine on my Anritsu S331D. Great product for the price. I'd buy another one for a diversity shot to the other tower if it would help. I live 1.3miles away from my cellular tower on the other side of a hill in full defilade. The hill rises another 20ft above my roof and, to ice the cake, has +20ft of tree growth on top of it. At 20ft AGL this antenna is able to bring in, literally, nothing and provide me with -113dBm (-100dBm at night) of signal which is barely enough to utilize my Mofi 4G LTE Modem / Ubifi Cellular internet connection. If your situation is like mine you may need to run your antenna up a tree, or purchase a mast to attach it to. That is the next stage of this project.

I suspect other bad reviews on this device may have poor installation, you need to do your research and know what you are doing for a successful building-based cellular Internet service. That being said - No, this isn't the same thing as a "repeater", this is for an endpoint, you need to connect this to a cellular router. 1.) use your smart phone (with the same carrier) and download a cellular antenna / signal app to get an inkling of where your nearest antennas are. Note, the closest one may not be the best (if there is a concrete high-rise between you for example). 2.) Make sure you impedance match the antenna and cabling to the device you are using. This is a 50 ohm device, you will need 50 ohm coax, and a 50 ohm interface on your device. If other, buy something else. 3.) Make sure you know which interface to connect to on the device.. My MOFI4500 has two ports for cellular antennas, it came with a couple of $2.00 Chinese paddle things connected. One of them is the primary, one is the secondary, they are not "load balanced" or whatever you may have in your head. If not marked on the device, look on the manufacturer's website for a schematic or search their technical support forums (or email them). 4.) I saw some garbage comments about obsession with U-bolts. Buy the installation kit. It comes with those, it's an extra $15, you get a nice aluminum mounting pole, the right hardware, and the right ubolt. Having a single ubolt isn't a problem if you follow the directions and use the backing plate correctly. If days of your time is less valuable than just spending $15 on the right parts, so be it, but don't gripe about the device when not using the right parts. 5.) Use the correct lossless cable, people seem to have problems going more than 5 or 10 feet - great, if you are sticking it next to your window and mounting it on the rain gutter. Whatever. Most of us have more complex installations, I had no problem installing 2 antennas with 2 lengths of 49.2 foot low-loss 50 ohm coax with pre-installed N adapter (about $20 on Amazon each). 6.) Don't yank on that cheap coax, that isn't mil-spec, it's made-in-China. Carefully pull it through the nooks and crannies, carefully tape up the end and use a wire-feeder rod, don't just shove it through the drill hole and don't yank it through to show off your manly strength by "clearing" the coils with brute strength. Get your butt off the ladder, walk over, clear the snags, pull it through smoothly. 7.) Once installed, I used my smart phone connected to the interior Wifi and monitored the signal status on the MOFI. I moved this about 5 degrees each time, and basically went in a 360 degree circle and marked the points where the signal was the strongest, and kept notes of my findings. Of the best signals, I did some speed testing and picked the most stable one for up & download, then locked down all the hardware. If this doesn't take you about an hour, you are probably doing it wrong. Don't assume the pointy-end of this device is the best for lobing and signal gathering, while that is the case in theory, I had much better real-world performance about 15 degrees off-target, probably because the right direction is pointed straight at the neighbor's house, and I cant' do anything about that. 8.) Make sure you are subscribing to the best carrier in your area, generally AT&T is a little better in rural areas like where I live, but we are a thoroughfare for two population centers and during commute hours the AT&T network is saturated. LTE is extremely sensitive to network congestion, so even if your signal strength is good, performance will suffer with a lot of users. In my case, AT&T = about 7 mbps, best case, I switched to Sprint and hit 80 mpbs off-peak performance and it's never under 15 (up and down). Your results will vary, not every tower has every carrier - in fact, most of them don't. Your smart phone app above will tell you that. 9.) Once you lock your target, assuming you have gone this far, you are not using the NETGEAR or Linksys cellular router either. My MOFI 4500 allows me to view and test all carriers available, and individually test each frequency band on each one. In my case, even though "Sprint High Speed" was available, it's performance was pretty bad. I have the best and most stable connection on Band 26, 700 mhz. Kind of a bummer, as my iPad Pro with a Sprint chip hits 80-125 mbps all day long.. but that's also a $1400 device, not a $49 flag antenna. It is what it is. 10.) Select the best option with various compromises for bandlock, and lock the channel. If you can aggregate carrier channels, all the better, my MOFI supports that, but it doesn't appear as though the local towers do from my testing, or my firmware on the router isn't ideal. Difficult to tell, but it didn't work in my case. 11.) Repeat for antenna #2. For the second antenna, I chose to use a Wilson pole-style one with radial arms on it and did a simple mounting at the end of the garage eave so that it was far away from the primary. The router won't rely on it, and to be honest, I saw no difference in performance adding the second, but it does smooth out the intermittent signal loss from rain, storms, etc. Using the omni-directional one, it's a plain plastic white and blends in with the architecture versus another flag that would stick out like a sore thumb at the front of the house. The negatives... I get decent performance, but the mounting hardware itself could be better designed. I realize it's for adaptability, but selling a few options for vertical versus horizontal flat surfaces, etc., would take out the reliance on nuts & bolts (which will ultimately loosen). That being said, if you follow the directions, it's generally fine.

I bought two of these to use with a Nighthawk M1 router on AT&T. They helped increase and stabilize my speeds. Previously, my Nighthawk would fluctuate often between 3 and 4 bars and sometimes down to 2. With the antennas hooked up I am fluctuating between 4 and 5(max) bars. Previously, my upload speed would be decent between 5 and 8 or so Mbps but they would fluctuate a lot and dip into the 1.5Mbps territory which was a problem for me and live streaming video. Dipping below my set upload speed will cause buffering and lost frames for other viewers. With these antennas my upload speeds have increased slightly to around 8-11Mbps but more importantly they are stable so there aren't large, momentary dips in upload speed which means no buffering or lost frames when live streaming. Download speeds also benefited and went anywhere from 15-20ish Mbps to over 30Mbps. Though, I care less about download speeds as they were fine for me before so I haven't tested them thoroughly since getting the antennas. I bought these specifically hoping they would help stabilize my upload speed and they seem to have done that. I am not using an amplifier or booster. I am using two of these antennas pointed in the direction of the tower along with 30ft of Wilson400 cable for each antenna finished off with a pair of MPD N female to TS-9 adapters into my Nighthawk. I do not have the antennas in any sort of MIMO configuration I have seen people talk about as Wilson themselves say "They are polarity antennas which are strictly vertical" which comes directly from the Q&A's of this product. There are even drain holes for water which are meant to be facing down. I simply mounted two of them in a vertical position pointed in the direction that gave me the best signal strength. Maybe one would have worked but I didn't want to go through the trouble of installing one and testing. The cost was not that much to just install two and be done with it.

I've used the Wilson 4G-M booster in my vehicle for more than a year. I work remotely out of my truck camper. The 12-inch omni-directional antenna is great in many situations, often boosting a 3G data signal into a much better 4G signal. But in remote areas I needed more boost so I decided to try this Yagi antenna. I attached it to a 12-foot mast (electrical conduit that we had laying around the shop) and attached it to my booster in the middle of the San Rafael Swell in Utah, where the Verizon signal is very hit or miss. In a location where there was essentially no signal with my regular setup, this antenna gave me a full four bars of 4G signal. The throughput was still slow, but was amazing to see this antenna pull in such a strong signal in a place where the omni-directional antenna could not. This is a 70-degree antenna so you only have to turn it four or five times in order to pinpoint the location of the nearest tower. Better yet, because this one is directional you can actually pick the best tower for your location (rather than rely on the omni-directional version, which may flip back and forth between towers). Although Wilson will tell you this is for stationary applications only, I had great success driving slowly with this antenna in place. That way I could hunt down the best signal without raising and lowering it. But understand that the plastic construction will not withstand high vehicle speeds (anything over 15 MPH might be iffy). My Wilson setup has totally changed the way I work remotely and their technical support is amazing via phone and email. The techs are courteous and take the time to explain technical details in a way that makes sense to the layman. Highly recommended. If you struggle to improve your signal using these products, keep in mind that your location may have a lot to do with it. Cell phone signals are crazy complicated and bounce around all over the place, and even network engineers struggle with signals sometimes.

Quick outline of my rural home setup - 1. Netgear M1 Nighthawk for my router. 2. Using AT&T tower ( 4G LTE ) that is appx 3 miles away on a hilltop but clear line of sight with no obstructions. 3. Mounted this Wilson directional antenna on upper eave of the house, pointed toward tower. 4. Spent the extra money ( although it's not a whole lot more and well worth the slight extra expense ) and ran 50 feet of LMR400 coax cable from antenna to the Nighthawk. I had over the course of 3 weeks tried various homemade and also purchased indoor antennas; none of these improved the signal and thus the speed very much. Speeds would average around 20 Mbps and throughout the day I would have to move the Nighthawk to another location within the house to keep this speed going; don't ask me why it would drop at times in one particular spot - that's a question for the techies. After connecting this antenna to the Nighthawk, the speeds instantly jumped dramatically. I am now averaging 42 Mbps and the family is happy that we can stream 3 movies simultaneously with no issues. To those of you wrestling with a slow internet, you know too well what those issues are as 2 or 3 people try to stream a movie or show. For some reason ( again, this would be a techie question ) my speeds occasionally will now jump up to 50 or 60 Mbps and I have seen a couple 80's. I was prepared to spend triple the price of this antenna, which is currently at $49 ; I have even seen this antenna for $89 on other websites. I was also considering that I may have to buy a booster/amplifier ( those run some $300 and up ) but with this Wilson antenna by itself, my speeds are more than enough to keep a 3 person family happy. For the money, this was an extraordinary purchase. Sometimes a product actually exceeds the advertising - this is one of those cases. I am totally satisfied with this Wilson antenna.

This ended up going in the parts bin - a wideband antenna is good from a you-don't-have-to-know-what-frequency perspective, but this antenna gives you maybe 8dBi as near as I can tell and while better than nothing, it is just not that great. In my case I'm about 16 miles from the closest unobstructed tower which is 3,000' below my antenna altitude and even with a booster it just didn't cut it. Using software for my phone I learned that Verizon was always starting me off at 700Mhz LTE Band 13, but would invariably hand me off to Band 4 at 1700/2100 Mhz even if the signal there was much weaker. That lead to a Yagi focused on those frequencies - Phonetone 1700MHz-2100MHz AWS WCDMA 3G Directional External Outdoor Yagi Antenna with N-female Connector where you get 14dBi of improvement. After living with that for a couple of years I'm now looking at parabolic antennas where you can get 19dBi or 23dBi depending on model - while the current antenna works ok, reception can be a bit seasonal as well as weather influenced and sometimes is still poor. I guess the long and short of it is that it is best to know what frequencies you need and buy an antenna focused on those frequencies. That doesn't mean that this antenna won't work for you, just that you can do probably do better. The antenna is fairly well made, but the popsicle shield conceals the fact that the antenna itself is really quite small and the shield is also an issue in requiring a mount that can handle high winds given the profile of the shield.

I live in my 5th wheel the majority of the time and rely on my cell phone and jetpack for my internet. I was using an omni directional antenna for my cell booster, but I just couldn't get a great signal, so I bought the yagi. Installation is pretty simple, but entirely depends on your situation. The Yagi needs to be 25' away from booster and should be directed to a tower in a direction that is away from the booster antenna to prevent interference. For me this proved to be the hardest part of installation. Once installed, I watched my cell signal increase by 20 dBs almost instantly. While this can give you a better signal, it can't help with tower congestion.