During the campaign several people asked about a 5 antenna perk/option and Martin Strbačka always answered that you were still measuring that. Even this blog post by Ondřej Filip talked about that. Two months have passed, since that blog post and there are still no news about the 5 antenna option. So, will it be possible to get turris omnia with 5 antennas or not? Thank you very much for this project!
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I think they are going to use dual band antennas.
I would prefer a 3 3 configuration, so you can have dual band in all antennas.
3 + 3 would mean 3 + 3 + 2 for LTE models. Maybe 9 Antennas for three triple-chain WiFi cards. Add another one for Xbee, maybe another one for one of the lower ISM bands like 433 or 868/915. This will get quite messy.
Looking at the photos of the router in the colour survey, I think that the default is 3 dual antennas for both bands that will merge the signals for both frequencies. I was just under the impression that it would be possible to change the number of antennas and/or to order a NAS version of the router, before it started shipping. Maybe I just misunderstood something. I just want to know if there will be a 5 antenna option or not, so I can finalize my order. If it’s an option being planned I won’t finalize my order right now and will wait for it to be available. I just don’t want to be waiting for nothing. Maybe Martin Strbačka, Ondřej Filip, or Bedrich Kosata could share with us the results of the measurements made with both solutions. Again, thank you very much for this project!
@guinhas, the blogpost you referenced also contains the following sentence: “We plan to use the same signal combiners that are commonly used in Wi-Fi cards supporting both frequencies.” To me this sounds like they will do what everyone else does, i.e. use dual-band antennas.
Personally I don’t see a problem with that. It has been working fine for me and besides I want to get away from 2.4 GHz rather today than tomorrow.
I think there is no reason to wait with finalizing your order. Even if they added additional options later (which I don’t expect) they would probably still allow them to be changed like it was the case with the case’s color choice.
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@dhopfm, yes, I know that, but they were also planning for a plastic case, guess what… It’s metal now. As I said in the previous post, “Looking at the photos of the router in the colour survey, I think that the default is 3 dual antennas for both bands that will merge the signals for both frequencies”, and you can’t really have that without using signal combiners, so that was implicit… Also, if you look at the older turris routers, they were also 3 dual antennas, so it makes sense that they were going to keep the same design right? Except that the prototype of the turris omnia is a 5 antenna router, as seen in the Perks section of the indiegogo campaing page and as it was also mentioned in this blog post. So if the prototype was 5 antennas, maybe there’s some advantage to it? Maybe not, that’s why I asked if the measurements could be shared. I have been using 5GHz for 6 years (WRT610N), and at least for me it wasn’t that easy to ditch 2.4GHz, sure 5GHz is a lot faster, but it’s range was a lot shorter, to the point that 5GHz was only faster in the same room as the router. And I know things have changed quite a bit with the AC standard, and with more and more hardware supporting 5GHz, but a lot of people around the world (myself included) still have old hardware laying around that doesn’t support it, and even some new low-end devices don’t support it to. Yes I already finalized it, mostly because as looking at other topics besides this one, there aren’t many CZ.NIC people answering questions any more, so waiting would be pointless. They are supposed to start shipping next month so everyone must be VERY busy finalizing everything. It’s the homestretch!
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Hi. I saw pictures (32C3 and other conferences) of the omnia, with 5 RP-SMA mounting holes. I really hoped, that there will be an option for us to decide but it seems that we will be out of luck this time. I still hope that I am able to redesign it (add holes, plug pigtails) in an easy way on myself. For me the 2.4 GHZ band is (unfortunatelly) still very important. Think about all the “IoT”-devices, RPi3, Arduino, ESP etc. - I mean there will a specialized fw in the omnia to handle these kind of devices (because it is an important topic today) - but these devices are typically far away from the BS/AP inside of walls with bad and minimalistic low-powered antennas. Therefore I really hoped that I could address such conditions with specialized external antennas.
Here is a picture of the case with the add. connectors. Maybe there will be an option to choose this case-top?
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXY46VDWwAA4WEx.jpg]
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXY46VDWwAA4WEx.jpg)
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as said before, those are most likely for LTE/HSPA connection
Hope this isn’t a necropost – but I broke an antenna during a move. The link above appears to be dead. Are the antennas available from anywhere else?
The Omnia user manual says:
ANTENNAS: 3× 2.4GHz/5GHz 5 dBi omni-directional RP-SMA 3T3R MIMO