I live in a semi-rural community with few internet options.

T-mobile become an option so I decided to give it a shot. It’s a decent price/performance option between DSL and cable internet.

As you can see I’ve made a fully custom hanging shelf with a piece of scrap 1/4" plywood and twine for optimal placement.

I then cracked open the unit and installed external antenna adapters. I placed a directional antenna on the roof.

I kept experiencing complete connection dropouts which became worse over time. After some research I found that other users said that the problem was the unit overheating.

I placed a 120mm fan on top. I wired up a barrel jack so it can be plugged into a normal 12v adapter and it just stays on all the time. I might clean this up and use a temperature controller in the future. It’s currently held to the unit with scotch tape.

Everything has been stable for now. Maybe I’ll find some more ways to tweak it to get better performance.

  • David@beehaw.orgEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Nice!

    I had to do similar with mine but threw together some scrap lumber to build up around our printer:

    We’ve had an LTE modem for a long while which is quite expensive but no data cap. Just recently added T-mobile’s 5G Lite modem which while much faster does have a cap. So added a pfSense firewall and setup a failover WAN rule to give the work computer 5G during business hours.