Question

I have a RUTX14 connected to 4 directional antennas in a rather rural area of Poland. I'm about 2.2 km from one tower and 4.1 from another. I get the best signal (RSSI) on band 20 and usually this is the primary band (PCC). There are other bands that connect (B3, B1 and B7). The operator is Orange.

All was well for a few weeks (B20 was pcc, and B1+B7 scc). I would get a consistent 50Mbps down and 20-25Mbps up. Rather good for being so remote. I moved the antennas slightly as I was testing what gave better signal (they are 10 degrees off previous position, which sometimes resulted in the same issue as I am describing). Now, from time to time I see the order change and the upload down to 2-3Mbps with a slight gain in DL speed.

This happens when SINR of B1 is higher than SINR of B20. Is there any way to instruct the modem to keep B20 as primary ? Or is there any way to tell it to use it for upload? Via AT commands, perhaps.

My go-to solution is restricting to B20+B7, as this will guarantee B20 as pcc

Thanks for any tips or ideas.

Answer 1

Hello,

 

To make the B20 your primary while still allowing the device to connect to different bands as SCC, please refer to this article about cell locking. Lock your device to the B20 EARCFN + PCI and it will always be your primary, while the other bands will be secondary.

Since the cell lock is removed every time the device reboots, I'd recommend placing the QNWLOCK command in System → User Scripts page so it automatically locks to a cell every time the device reboots.

Let me know if any more help is needed!

 

Best regards,
DaumantasG

Comments

Thanks, I will try it out this coming weekend and report back. I also have some antenna angle discovery to do and verify that I have the antennas paired correctly.

---

Sure, let me know how it goes.

---

Hi, so I rolled the dice and tried this remotely... and I succeeded. I had to issue slightly different commands, as the example in the link above produced an error. This post on Quectel's forum helped, though the router is from Microtik, but the modem is the same (EG12) https://forums.quectel.com/t/eg12-and-freq-or-cell-lock-feature/4619/5. EG12 can lock to multiple cells/EARFCNs, and the config key is "common/4g" instead of "common/lte".

So here's what worked (so that it can help others):

gsmctl -A 'AT+QNWLOCK="common/4g",1,<EARFCN>,<PCI>

if I was to lock multiple cells, I would use:

gsmctl -A 'AT+QNWLOCK="common/4g",2,<EARFCN1>,<PCI1>,<EARFCN2>,<PCI2>

Hope it helps someone in the future

---

These commands can also be used, correct.

The same goes for the RUTX50. I will update the Wiki article in the future with this command.

Let me know if there are any further questions!

  

Best regards,
DaumantasG