Hey guys.
This is Andrew Esquivel here back with another review/tutorial/informational video for you.Today,
we are going to be talking about external antennas and how they go along with your cell
phones like the Galaxy S4.
Now, there’s a lot to go over and there’s a lot of very important information you really
need to know before you even consider one of these.
So, if you’re going to bear with me here, you’re going to learn a lot.First off, not
every Galaxy S4 is the same.
For instance, over here, I have a T Mobile Galaxy S4.
Now, the ports that we use to connect the antenna to are this little guy right here
and this little guy down here.
Now, one thing to note, R1 is what’s labeled for up here, that’s supposed to be for 3G
connections and L1 is supposed to be for 4G connections.
I have seen documentation stating that it’s different for different versions of the phone
and over here, we have a Sprint Galaxy S3 tri-band, notice there is only of these ports
and R1 is down here instead of up here.
So, there are different ways the phone communicates with the antenna.
In a tri-band version, R1 is the connection that you would use to connect your antenna
for 4G connections.
So, things work a little differently across manufacturers.
Another thing to note and I want to make sure you all know this before you do anything is
these little adaptors have tiny little metal pins inside of them that connect to these
R1 and L1 ports.
Now, if for whatever reason, you plug those connections in too deeply or you, for some
reason, used your own wire to try and make your own antenna, you stick it there, you
could permanently damage your phone.
There’s a connection in here that will cut off the connection from the internal antenna
in order to make a connection with the external antenna and if you push in too hard, you’ll
break that connection and only be able to use external antennas for the rest of your
phone’s life.Now, I’ve seen documentation stating other ways that the phone deals with
internal and external antennas.
One way was suggesting that the phone simply chooses between internal or external antennas
based on which antenna was getting a better signal.
I have used this for a little bit now and I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation.
We will get to this eventually but you got to be super careful.
These connections are not super secure.
You don’t want to move them so that they’re tilting in any manner.
You want to be very gentle with them.
If you screw up, there’s really not much you can do other than taking off all the plates
and there are points in here where you can resolder the connection if you’re feeling
like being a technician on your phone.
I’ve also read that using these may void your warranty.
There’s a lot of mishmashed information on the internet about this concept and even
go so far to suggest that these ports were only designed for Samsung to test the internal
antennas.
So, information is very hard to figure out.I am going to attempt to clear as much of that
as possible.
Even though these ports were designed for Samsung to test the antennas, supposedly they’re
also there in case you want to use external antennas.
The external antenna concept is simply trying to get a better signal especially in rural
areas or increasing your upload and download speed on your network by getting a better
signal, instead of four bars, now you get five.
We’re going to go over that with it connected and you’re going to see the difference between
the internal and the external antennas.
So, what we’re going to be doing is we’re using the Galaxy S4 from T Mobile instead
of the Sprint, so we’re going to take Sprint and put it on this side over here and first
off, we need to start the phone up because we need to get some benchmarks, some differences.
We need to know what kind of signal we’re getting from the phone without the antennas
in the first place in order to see if it’s even worth having the antenna because these
things are big and bulky, you don’t carry them with you.
They’re actually magnetic on the bottom, so they’re designed for you to stick on
the top of your car and I have driven with this on the top of my car, I was going about
45 miles an hour or so and this little bending point is also there so you can stick it on
the wall somewhere that has a metal plating like a door or something like that and get
you long distance because in theory, this antenna is super long, you can put it somewhere
wherever you get a better signal than where you’re sitting, but anywho, now that we’ve
got the phone started up, let’s go ahead and open under my applications here for testing
network signal.
Now, we’re not going to get into much technical detail but let’s take a look at the meter
here.
Now, we’ll get this number right here that says that is over DBM, long story short, the
smaller that number is or the closer to zero because it’s all negative, so the smaller
that number is, the better your signal is.
Right now, it’s at about 110 but I’ve seen it go as far down as to 105 in my area.
Now, signal strength is purely circumstantial.
You can have a great signal at one spot of your house and a terrible signal on the other
spot or it could be across town what have you, so we’re going to try and do everything
from this spot right here and make sure it’s as reliable and accurate information as possible,
so okay, 19 DBM.
Next, we’re going to Speedtest by Ookla and we’re going to see what speeds we can
get with this signal.
So, I’m going to choose my own server and we’re going to begin the test.
So we have an average of download of 15.33 Mbit/s, remember there’s 8 bits in a byte,
so 8 Mbit on a Megabyte as well and 3.96 Mbit/s upward.
So with that being said, we now have our benchmark.
Now, what we’re going to do is plug the external antennas in and see what difference
we get and I don’t believe you should have to turn the phone off to plug it in but I’m
going to do it anyway just so you get a clean slate for this test.Okay, so we have the phone
connected into the L1 port and you’ll notice that it only connected one of the connections
into the L1 port.
The reason for that is, I don’t believe you were supposed to have two connections
on this antenna at the same time despite the fact that it came with it, I’ve noticed
through my own trial and error that connecting only one of the connections to L1 seems to
yield better results.
However, we’re going to attach one by itself, both at the same time, and one in the R1 port
instead of the L1 port.
So let’s turn on the phone, go back to the same application we’re using before for
signal strength and we’re going to compare to what we have before.
So looking at it here, we have got 109 DBM which is more or less around the spot, 110
and no matter what, that is going to fluctuate a little bit.That’s just how it is when
you’re dealing with cell networks because wireless technology can be affected by so
many things, the distance from the your cell tower, how many people are active on that
cell tower, the rooms around you, what are the walls are made of, etc. so like I said,
everything is very circumstantial.
So you see our signal strength is about the same and we’re going to go back over to
Ookla Speedtest and we’re going to make sure I select the same server, so we go into
settings, change server, and yup I have the same server, so we’re going to begin the
test.
The test is done, we averaged 7.77 Mbit/s down 2.59 Mbit/s up.
That makes you question why you even use an external antenna and like I said it’s kind
of weird because we’re not really sure how the antennas interact with the phone.
Is there a switch somewhere that I can go on the settings to change it?
I don’t know; but someone said there was but never provided any information on how
to do it, someone says it’s an automatic switch, and some say it’s going to choose
the best of the two signals.
Now, what we’re going to do is, for the sake of curiosity, we’re going to connect
the 2nd FME connection into the R1 port and we’re going to see how that affects the
phone.So, we’re going to go back to our network decibel meter here and as you can
see, we’re still around the same.
I mean, I can take the antenna and move it around and it doesn’t seem to do much.
These connections at the back don’t stay in very well so I kind of keep my fingers
place on it just gently so that they don’t fall out and we’re going to try another
speed test with both of these connections in.
So this time, we averaged 10.26 Mbit/s download and 0.43 Mbit/s upload.
That’s interesting results to say the least.Now, let’s do the final test where we take the
L1 connection out, keep the R1 connection in and we’ll go back to our network.
So we’re still around right there and we’re going to do one more speed test.
This is with the R1 connection only.
So, our download this time was 12.27 Mbit/s and our upload was 5.17 Mbit/s.So what does
that tell us?
It tells us that you might as well just stick to the internal antenna.
Based on the performance that I’ve seen, there doesn’t appear to be any particular
gains.
Now that being said, I have been using this antenna all day, everywhere from inside my
car driving around checking signals as I drive around and I’ve used it in my house in various
places.
There was a point where I was downloading something and I was tethering to my computer,
downloading a video game via Steam and when I connected the antenna, my speed has almost
doubled, when I disconnected it, it would go back down, but then I do controlled tests
like this and you can’t notice much of difference, so long story short, it could be the antenna.
Maybe this antenna is just not that great.
There are other antennas you can get to work with this connection and I’ll show you because
these two connectors right here go into this antenna like this.
I believe it’s a coax type cable and you can change out the antenna with a different
one.
There’s one from, I think it’s called Wilson Electronics, could be wrong.
They also make an antenna along with the same frequency bands as this and another thing
to know is maybe GSM and CDMA phones, their frequencies work better with this antenna
than the other version, who knows?
I only have T Mobile to test it with.The Sprint phone is here just because we have one lying
around.
We don’t have Sprint service unfortunately so there’s no way to test that.
So it could be the antenna, it could be the phone itself versus this phone itself, who
knows?The fact of the matter is, you’re risking damaging your phone for this concept
and for that reason, I really can’t, in all honesty, recommend doing this.
With such scattered information out there and no real explanation as to what everything
does and how it does it.
I mean, it’s 45 bucks for this antenna and it’s like a few hundred dollars for your
phone.
Do you really want to risk it?
If so, I’d love to see someone use the Wilson Electronics antenna and make a video of that
just to see how it stacks up but until then, this is pretty much it.
There’s not much else to talk about.
We’ve tested everything we can.
With that being said guys thanks for watching.
I hope it was informative.
Hopefully, this answers a few questions that people run into and as always, I will see
you next time.
Don’t forget to comment, rate, subscribe, share to your friends, check out my other
videos, we got plenty of them and Happy New Year.