Hi there,

I have some newbie questions regarding the antenna mod on the WNDR3700 router; maybe you can help me sort something out in my head.

If I may be allowed to shoot them..here it goes:

The WNDR3700 has by default 8 internal antennas, 4 for 2.4 ghz circuit, 4 for 5 ghz if I understood correctly.
Now the antenna mod add 4 external antennas and I guess disables the 8 internal ones.
This means that we are left with 2 antennas for 2.4 ghz and 2 for 5 ghz.
Now, in MIMO we have one spatial stream going out over 1 antenna.
This means that the maximum theoretical transfer rate is achieved over 4 spatial streams and 4 antennas.

1) Am I correct ?

2) Why would it then be feasible to replace the 4 antennas (4 spatial streams) of the 5 Ghz circuit and a maximum theoretical bw of 600 mbps for 2 external antennas and a maximum theoretical bw of 300 mbps ?
Is the range better with the external antennas ? (I've read an article which claimed the internal antennas are better regarding noise isolation and range for MIMO; don't know if the article was correct)

Thanks in advance and hope you can clear up my dilemmas.

A change in the matrix? Don't be annoying. https://openwrt.org/support.html

?!
super.
thanks.

(Last edited by skyraven on 5 Aug 2011, 08:39)

Id also like to know this. And please MBS - dont respond.

janptak, just ignore the malicious comments. there will always be people like that with low people and social skills

from what I could find out on my own  (and it might possibly be wrong):

MIMO support is implemented only for a max of 2 streams although the WNDR3700 has that many antennas ( 4 x 2.4ghz, 4 x 5ghz); for MIMO support to be 3 or 4 stream enabled, just a firmware update is not all that is needed (seems that the hardware must also catch up).

So in my opinion and after also going on Netgear's site, I would say that initially you have:
4 x 2.4 ghz antennas - > max 2 are chosen to be used in MIMO and the router chooses the best one(ones) signal wise for TX/RX toward you
4 x 5 ghz antennas -> same stuff as for 2.4 ghz

So probably if you replace those 4 internal antennas for let's say the 2.4 ghz chip, with 2 external antennas, then you would still get MIMO 2 streams, the only difference being there would be no selection of which antenna to use regarding signal quality for communicating with you.

(Last edited by skyraven on 11 Aug 2011, 09:34)

Great info! Thanks!

Appreciated :-) But there are certain rules in this forum that we all accepted when signing up. And one is that we don't make multiple posts of the same topic or try to get attention on our posts in a short period of time. If someone is able to help, that person will do so. It's all mentioned in the link I posted, so I will wrap up here.
But I'm glad to see that you've got progress on your own. I know pretty good how it feels, since the few questions I asked in this forum finally got solved by me as well.

Point taken.
Sorry from my part.
I think this was a good exercise in the end by putting together dispersed info all over the place I was able to reach a conclusion and now I'm waiting for my WNDR3700 to arrive so that I can play with it.