My neighbour has an old rust bucket of a pickup truck behind his shed. Its rear end encroaches on my property. The truck bed has holes along the side for a canopy. Since one of these holes was very clearly across my property line, I stuck my broom handle in that and aimed the antenna towards the cell tower. *
That puts the antenna almost 30′ from the rig and about 7′ from the ground. I knew from my experience with the whip antenna that I had to get as far to the northwest from the rig as I could and stay close to the ground, hence why I thought the truck would be a good antenna holder.
My RSSI number, the only thing I have to gauge the quality of my signal, dropped from -106 to -96 and has been hovering between -98 and -96. My phone still isn’t working here, but it barely works up the hill with the booster, so that’s fine.
My mother and I desperately needed to have a voice to voice business meeting so I decided to try Skype. We spoke for 28.5 minutes and only got about 10 seconds of fadeout. Otherwise, the sound was crystal clear and there was almost no lag. Moreover, she was on wifi across the house from her modem, not on ethernet, so the fadeout could have been at her end.
I have also been able to effortlessly stream Netflix since I moved the antenna to that location. I am so happy! I just need to find something colourful to tie to the antenna wire so that no one gets decapitated walking across that part of my lawn!
(* my neighbour will likely be happy that someone is putting that truck to good use!)
Good news, you had better buy that truck! 😉
LOL! I plan to put a shed in that corner, so the antenna will eventually get mounted to that.
That’s actually an increase of 10dB, from -106 to -96. Ten dB is a 10x increase in signal power received.
As RSSI is usually measured in dBm (dB referenced to a milliwatt), -96dBm is 0.25 micro-microwatt, or 0.25 picowatt, a still very weak signal.
That shows how sensitive modern electronics are.
I still think the RSSI doesn’t mean much. Up the hill without the booster, the Mifi had the same RSSI as I got at the rig with the booster, 108ish. Despite that, I still got the best download speeds up my life up the hill, over 1MBps.
NWBound is correct. Here is a chart showing what you can expect when you see a gain in dB
3 dB ? 2 times the power
6 dB ? 4 times the power
10 dB ? 10 times the power
20 dB ? 100 times the power
Humm… formatting problem. ? should be = sign
I know you are just dying to see the formula 😉
Level in dB: L = 10 × log (power ratio)
I’m not disagreeing with you guys on the math. I’m just disagreeing that the RSSI number as provided by the junky Mifi 2 has any bearing on the quality of the signal. 🙂
You are correct that RSSI does not tell the whole story. It is a measure of signal strength, but not of signal quality. The signal you received may be so distorted because of multipath interference, i.e. indirect signals bounced off objects or terrain. These signals add up in a pell-mell fashion at the receiver but are not coherent for data transmission.
An analogy is that one may hear a loud voice in a cavern, but still has problem understanding the speech because of all the echoes.
See, I am not disagreeing with you, but just wanting to tell a bit more about the logarithmic scale of the RSSI measure.