Is there anything more infuriating than intermittent failures? They happen time and again until you finally find a pattern. Usually you “upgrade” to something different long before you find the failure pattern. I’ve been tracking down Amped Wireless failures for about a month. Things would work great for hours, sometimes days, then, it would just lose connection. You could reconfigure it and see 61% signal strength from the base unit, but still not be able to communicate.
Had this fight happened on its own I would have solved it much sooner, but, I was also involved in a significant battle with Verizon Wireless or a lack of signal to my location. After many repair attempts over the span of a month and a half, I ended up regressing back to my original white USB dongle because those shiny new LTE things which are supposed to successfully fallback to EVDO simply aren’t supported by the older towers. Until you get LTE actually in your area, attempting to save $10/month by “upgrading” your modem will bring you nothing but endless frustration.
So, once I had the outbound connection problem fixed, I thought I was good and for a week or so actual events seemed to confirm that. Then came the lost connection which took half a day to restore. A few days later the same thing happened. It wasn’t until today that I finally stumbled on the answer.
Yes, I probably could have done what everybody else does, log a big complaint about this product then purchase an upgrade to an SR300 or SR1000, but, I work in IT and I wanted to know the answer. Actually, the answer was staring me in the face any time I booted my notebook in the office, but I don’t boot it very often.
You will notice that the SR150 show here is a single antenna kind of beast. Well, while it could receive from the MBR1400 a 61% signals strength, it could only get 2 bars worth of signal to the inside of the building where the MBR1400 was. On days of high humidity or other atmospheric disturbance, the signal strength was even less.
There was nothing I could do with the MBR1400 as it is a 3 antenna device and it strongly advised you don’t try replacing only one antenna. You see, I still have the Outdoor 18dBI Antenna all mounted up and cabled into my office, just couldn’t use it with the MBR.
Of course the obvious solution implemented today was to swap the two devices. Now the MBR sits in the house and can easily transmit to my office. The SR150 now has that massive 18dbi antenna instead of its pathetic little factory original thing and signal strength is amazing. Yes, I bought the outdoor antenna years ago on eBay, but it looks a lot like this one.
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=18-DBI-ANTENNA&cat=NET
All things are now bright and beautiful.
I suspect most people having trouble with this device are having the same kind of troubles I was: very weak signal. The factory antenna is useless. Before you kick this product to the curb for losing connection the 50,000 th time, try hooking up a much better antenna.
