Hi, I purchased a Linksys wrt1900acs v2 from ebay tagged "for parts". At first glance, it is fully operational. I hope to nurse it back to full health. It is missing antenas, so I need to purchase those separately. Does anyone know the dBi gain value of the stock antennas for this model? Thank you.
I think it's 2 or 3 dbi , go for better antennas.
A really ignorant question if I may... There are 4 connectors, do I need to populate all 4 for the best effect? Would one or two high-gain antennas not do the job just as well? What would be the disadvantages of such an approach? Thank you.
You must populate all four with identical antennas (it's essential to profit from multiple chains/ MIMO (anything starting with 802.11n) and in order not to damage the amps) - and no, I wouldn't puck higher gain antennas (those only work by narrowing the donut shaped coverage, which is generally not ideal).
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MIMO makes a good sense... Please could you elaborate on "damaging the amps" part?
why, linksys have a set of a better performance antennas for 1900 ,3200,etc, and they sell that for a lot money.
The damaging applied to the (real) potential to damage the amps without attached antennas (hint SWR).
High gain antennas can't increase the power level, they can only focus it. For omnidirectional antennas that means you go from from a 'perfect' isotropic radiator to a donut shaped radiation, so you lose vertical reception in favour of gaining it horizontally. This is fine to some extent, but the higher the gain, the more emphasized this gets (dBm is based on an exponential scale, so 3 dBm doubles the gain) - and you very quickly end up with a (vertically) very narrow angle.
Especially for omnidirectional antennas targeting the consumer market, the high-gain label rarely really provides an improvement (and often enough, most of the plastic sheet around the dipole only pretends to be large, with most of its length remaining empty).
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Thank you, this has been very educating. I was not aware of the standing wave phenomena was applicable here. Just hoping that no damage has been done so far, as I did briefly run several wifi routers without antennas while reinstalling/testing them.
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