Need EASY network - 210' clear line of site

Ummm... I wanna see the outside antenna that handles all three MIMO antennas on a Belkin router. Maybe 3ea seperate antennas? That will look kinda strange. I don't think that MIMO plus external antennas is gonna play too well unless the antenna is specifically made for MIMO.

I'm mystified how D-Link can do MIMO with only two antennas on the DI-624M.

Me! #1 At the top! While I have Crossfire going... The Linksys WRT54G (super, amazing, magic, miracle, turbo, accelerated, simple, easy, fantastic) radio has two antennae connectors. If I hook up one external, what do I do with the other connector? 1) leave the duck attached, 2) take off the duck, 3) take off the duck and attach some kind of termination, 4) use a second external, 5)?

I don't think MIMO or anything else will work without antennas, but miracles do happen.

Beam forming? Is that like directional antenna? I'm lost in the lingo.

Gee thanks. I understand the first two sections on diversity reception having working with HF and cellular diversity systems. However, I'm lost in the 3rd and 4th sections on MIMO and V-Blast. Maybe when I'm awake, it will look better. I'll try the MATLAB model and see what happens. I can't even tell what it's suppose to do.

My father once warned me to avoid anything that's named super, amazing, magic, miracle, etc, as they never live up to their names. I've added turbo, accelerated, simple, easy, fantastic, and such to the list.

I drive a 1983 Dodge D50 diesel pickup with a turbocharger and 290K miles. I've cranked up the boost pressure to one atmosphere. Stomp on the pedal, wait 3 seconds, and then it takes off. Power peaks at

It depends on what you're doing. For a point to point link, the danger is that the 2nd antenna might pickup interference from a co-channel radio and distract the radio while it figures out if the traffic (or trash) is worth decoding.

1. If your WRT54G is indoors, and your antenna is outdoors, you can leave the cheezy 2nd antenna in place to allow indoor coverage. Diversity reception will switch back and forth between the two antennas and select the best antenna. Leaving the rubber ducky antenna in place doesn't hurt anything.
2. If you're using alternative firmware with the WRT54G and using it as a transparent bridge link to another WRT54G, with a pair of high gain antennas, and there's no need for any "local" coverage, then just unplug the extra antenna. Officially, you're suppose to terminate the unused antenna port with a 50 ohm load, but I don't bother. If the

1. Some radios have problems playing repeater going in one antenna and out the other. When I first tested this about 3 years ago, this arrangement resulted in about a huge loss in thruput. I just retested this arrangement with a WRT54Gv1.1 and Satori firmware and found no degradation at all. So, kindly ignore my previous pontifications on not using two antennas to play store-n-forward repeater or WDS bridge.

Incidentally, if you look carefully at the board layout of most internal PCI slot cards, you'll notice that it's really an enlarged mini-PCI card with a bigger circuit board. The 2nd antenna port is usually terminated with a 50 ohm chip resistor.

Now for the ultimate question, that boggles the minds of all that practice the art of wireless. The software settings for selecting antennas is labeled "left" and "right" antennas. Is that looking at the back of the radio or at the front? (Spoiler: It's the back, but I still can't believe Linksys did that).

I think you are missing the point. If you say that their expectations are all too high and the anntennas shouldn't work that well, that's one thing. If you are saying they had high expectatiosn and the antennas worked extremely well, but not that great, then that would be a different point. So, which is it? Because no amount of blathering will change the fact that high-gain antennas have a bad rap in the marketplace.

I'm pretty sure Jeff is going to need more statistics for your findings (ba-bum-bum).

But, that Probe -- it also has a bad rap in the market. Maybe people had too high of expectations. Yeah, that's it -- it's the consumers fault, of course!

So let me see if I understand your view. You would recommend commercial antennas over a consumer router, when both can get you 1500 feet. Why is that? It looks to me like you are admitting that consumer antennas (the ones that people buy in stores) are not a good route, so that tells me you're mixing your terms to make your point.

I didn't say either of those statements, those are your words.

You seem to have been exposed to a lot of bad rappers. First antennas and now the Probe too. That's okay, I don't care for rapping anyway. Generally, I'd say that most antennas I've been exposed to behave pretty much as advertised. It's the consumer level stuff that is likely to be victim to "It's the latest, greatest, fastest, mostest fantastical thing you'll ever buy and it only costs $9" marketing. And the consumers are victims too of course. But if you'll look at the specs on most decent quality antennas, they don't say it's good for 2 miles or 10 feet, it'll say it provides x-amount of gain in measurable amounts at a certain frequency. The rest of the equation is up to you, which includes but is not limited to the radio's power, sensitivity, ability to distinguish between good signal and noise, signal attenuation due to cables and connectors, interference, obstructions, weather, quality of installation, on and on.

Believe me, if there were a simple solution such as just buying a MIMO device and overcome all those obstacles, I'd try to be first in line to buy MIMO. I have no qualms with someone getting MIMO to better cover their home or office, but to make a blanket statement that antennas don't work like they should is no better than the hype in the other direction.