Unifi UK Ultra - Select External Antenna?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

I’ve installed OpenWrt 24 on a Unifi UK Ultra and intend to use it at events high up on a pole, to maximise range I was hoping to use external antenna. I’ve another one of these with stock firmware installed and it has a switch in the UI for internal or external antenna.

I’ve looked around in Luci and I can’t find reference to antenna selection, does anyone know if it’s possible with OpenWrt? The original firmware is based on it so I assume so, if anyone can give me a pointer I’d appreciate it

2

Found in the commit:

+ubnt,uk-ultra)
+       ucidef_add_gpio_switch "ant0_internal" "ANT0 Internal" "5" "1"
+       ucidef_add_gpio_switch "ant1_internal" "ANT1 Internal" "6" "1"
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3

Thanks, I’ll have a look at the gpio documentation to see how to switch this and share my findings to help others.

4

Strictly speaking you don't need to touch GPIO directly as they are already available as named objects.
See this example: Usb power is off on boot - #4 by eduperez

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5

Thanks for the pointers!

For anyone else wondering, this is how you do it. Also, it’s more intuitive if you think in terms of enabling or disabling the internal antenna.

This disables the internal antenna:

uci set system.ant0_internal.value="0"
uci set system.ant1_internal.value="0"
uci commit system

This enables it:

uci set system.ant1_internal.value="1"
uci set system.ant0_internal.value="1"
uci commit system

Otherwise if you think in terms of enabling the external it could get confusing as you’d be setting the above to 0 which is intuitively “off”.

To test this I set the radio power to 1db with external antenna plugged in. As soon as they were enabled the signal jumped, vice versa when switching back to the internal.

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6

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