Hi everyone,
I connected a homemade 2.4GHz cantenna instead of one of the 4 antennas of my Netgear Nighthawk X4S R7800. I would like to tell to R7800 to use the cantenna as a source of the Wi-Fi signal (to be "redistributed" therefore around the house through the 3 remaining antennas). I have already flashed OpenWrt on Netgear, but I have no idea how to proceed.
Would anyone know how to help me?
Thanks in advance for your help!
There is nothing to configure. Deep inside the hardware and the driver, the radio has independent signal "chains" that receive on all the antennas simultaneously. If any antenna receives a decodable packet, it will be used.
This would work better with a separate router or USB radio dedicated to the uplink, and the built in radio with stock antennas linking to users in the house.
Since 802.11n (and much more so with 802.11ac/ 802.11ax), features like MIMO (since 802.11ac wave2 as Mu-MIMO) have become an essential part of the wireless standards and are part of the reason why these performances and ranges can be achieved. For MIMO to work, it's important that the wireless chipset can drive the different rx/tx chains together, as a single entity - gain, length and distance between the antennas needs to match the expected values to provide acceptable results - this means all antennas need to be the same, with the same omni-directional characteristics (important for Mu-MIMO). Removing one antenna out of this array and replacing it with a directional one will break this MIMO setup and totally destroy its ability to beam form.
Thanks for your answers!
So what would be the best way to connect a directional antenna such as a homemade cantenna to a router (in my case the Netgear R7800, in fact) without affecting MIMO performance?
So simply by connecting the cantenna to the router as I did it should already "see" the networks nearby?