China 28dBi 4G LTE Multiband Antenna Review

For 8$ including shipping, it is little surprise that this antenna does not fulfill its exaggerated promise. Still, it is an extremely cheap option to get the network signal from the outside to the inside of a room.

I’m living in a city with a network tower nearby and can therefore receive the signal with a fairly good strength, but the walls of my flat attenuate it a lot. This means I have to get the signal from the outside, either with an external antenna or the dongle on the outside in a weatherproof case. USB cables are too thick to get them through the window without damage, and external antennas are usually pretty expensive. Before spending a lot of money, I ordered this cheap antenna and gave it a try.

The antenna is in a small plastic case and comes with two RG-172 cables of about 3 meters length and CRC9 connectors. I unfortunately couldn’t take a look inside because the case is glued together with lots of glue, and I’d have to destroy it to reveal the inside. That’s the Chinese way of making sure that nobody can see the probably messy and disappointing antenna construction.

Outdoor installation

Despite all the glue, it is not tightly sealed and I applied additional hot glue to get it weatherproofed for the outdoor installation. The cables are long enough for my use case, and thin enough to get them through the window frame without impacting damage (they do get a bit squeezed and bent though). I mounted it with double-sided tape to the window ledge.

Measurements

The following measurements are made with a Huawei E3372 LTE dongle on the 1800 MHz band.

The results of the dongle at the antenna mounting position:

RSSI: -55dBm
RSRP: -78dBm
RSRQ: -6dB
SINR: 24dB

The results with the antenna:

RSSI: -55dBm
RSRP: -78dBm
RSRQ: -4dB
SINR: 26dB

In comparison, the best result on the inside of the window:

RSSI: -71dBm
RSRP: -94dBm
RSRQ: -4dB
SINR: 18dB

As expected, the antenna does not improve the signal at all, but to my surprise also doesn’t make it worse. For the sake of just catching the signal from the outside, it seems to be a great deal.