In an increasingly online world, maintaining a consistent internet connection has become paramount for day-to-day life.
This is true regardless of location, whether you’re in the middle of a city or deep in the rural countryside, and is especially the case for those who are now working from home and need strong network speeds in order to stay connected. Even outside of working from home, popular leisure activities like streaming TV shows and online gaming also require quick and reliable data throughput with minimal buffering or latency.

A mobile router with a data SIM card has become the go-to solution for many looking to establish their own network connection, as the growing strength of 4G & 5G technology has made it a progressively viable alternative to a standard broadband connection.
An external antenna can be crucial for your mobile router solution in terms of achieving a strong, stable signal to eliminate the risk of drop-outs, buffering and low latency, all of which are problems that mobile internet solutions can be at risk of falling into.
It’s for this reason that we always recommend using an external antenna with your mobile router.

It can seem quite intimidating at first when it comes to selecting an external antenna, as there’s a great variety to choose from with lots of technical figures and terminology.
One of the first key decisions to make is whether a directional or omni-directional antenna is most suitable for your needs.

A directional antenna has a very high gain and picks up a narrow, focused beam of signal in whatever direction its aligned to aim towards.
Whereas an omni-directional antenna typically has a lower gain and picks up an equally strong signal from all directions around it.

Whether to use a directional or omni-directional antenna will largely depend on your location and certain environmental factors.
A directional antenna’s high gain allows it to pick up strong connections to cell towers even in rural areas where the nearest such cell tower may be several kilometres away. The antenna will need to be aligned to point towards the cell tower and it works best if there’s clear line-of-sight; physical obstructions such as buildings, hills and trees can cause the mobile signal to scatter off in unpredictable directions and make the antenna’s signal less reliable.

An omni-directional antenna will not be too impacted by physical obstructions due to its much wider focus, being capable of picking up all mobile data signals nearby even as they bounce around the environment.
This allows it to excel in urban environments where buildings blocking line-of-sight will be more abundant. It’s also much more likely that multiple cell towers will be within range of your antenna in an urban location, which gives omni-directional antennas another advantage because they can connect to whichever one of them has the best signal at the current time and move from one to another if it becomes slowed down by traffic from other data users.

You also have to consider how and where you’ll actually be installing the antenna. If it’s going on a vehicle, then it will likely have to be low-profile and capable of being surface and/or spigot mounted. If it’s going to be mounted on a boat or close to the sea then you’d want to ensure it’s a marine-grade antenna with a high IP rating.
You also have to think about cabling – it’s not recommended to have more than 5 metres of cable running from an antenna to a router because the loss of gain will become too great to justify the signal increase.
For this reason, you would want to either mount the antenna within 5 metres of your router location (or vice-versa) or use an outdoor router like the Teltonika OTD140. Another similar alternative is to use a router inside a waterproof enclosure that also acts as an antenna, like our QuWireless range.

Once you’ve selected an antenna and installed it outside, it’s important to check on its condition periodically to ensure you’re still getting the most out of it and that you’re not letting it degrade.
Small changes to environmental factors can have a big impact on local mobile signals, so you may occasionally want to adjust the alignment of the antenna and see if its signal strength improves on the router-side because it’s now catching the signal better.
It’s also important to ensure that the antenna’s mounting is still secure and robustly attached, check nothing has come loose or that the antenna is liable to fall off and sustain damage. You also should check that the cable connections are still in good condition and are securely fastened.

 

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Author: Daniel Coombs

15/05/2025

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