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Build your own devices, routers, relays, IoT etc.


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Starting a spot to post mods or builds, connected stuffs, antennetry, relay magic and other fun fixes.

I'll begin; 

Our latest weekend adventure is a box with failover/load balance between 2 LTE radios, one cat 7 at 2x1, the other cat 12 at 2x2 mimo. This 3+2x carrier aggregation combo could peak at 900mb p/s down by 225 up at the radios. All domestic ?? bands including LAA@5GHz and CBRS, except band 71. Input side is all set.

They feed into a router that will soon; tx AC Wifi on 2.4/5GHz and gsm on 900MHz. USB to ethernet bus for ~330mb p/s throughput over Ethernet. 5v means you can pretty much use this box anywhere. Has 2 more USB port for maybe forced air, another radio or peripherals. Bonus PoE too. Working out the kinks on software this week for the output side.

31ow.jpg31ox.jpg31oy.jpg31p1.jpg

Please share your builds, LTE solutions and especially your ideas. I have like 5 more variants going so I will share as I get through projects.

Have a great week everyone.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Out of town but quick check in, I set Moms up with this guy. 2xCA mPCIe radio>fast Ethernet. This is backhauled by our triband antenna site.

Wired Internet option is dsl or 2mbps fiber(wat!?!?!?!?!) So, here we are.

34fn.jpg

Had to test at home in a low signal area.

34fq.jpg

 

34ft.jpg

Just for adversity sake we threw long coax on, tested wifi coverage higher with a remote signal from large antenna. Then we dialed it right in via our multiplomitron of adapters. 

34fr.jpg

Sorry for the late post; I rocked this out last Monday and it is a pretty simple build inside. 2.4 WeeFee radio, fast ethernet and the LTE radio is on top under tape.34fs.jpg

 

If it slows down we can add a carrier via USB. The first radio is on board so I like that and mom gets her cat Vidya, pictures, scheduling for remote work and news. Success. I'll be back in town next week for 3x+3x and some Gb ports.

Have a great weekend everyone, keep building!

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Any Sprint B41 3CA setup?  Would love to get my hands on something that an do at very least 2CA.  I am using Cradlepoint for my Sprint hotspot.

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On 4/20/2018 at 12:53 AM, belusnecropolis said:
3 hours ago, bucdenny said:

Any Sprint B41 3CA setup?  Would love to get my hands on something that an do at very least 2CA.  I am using Cradlepoint for my Sprint hotspot.

I'll be back in town next week for 3x+3x and some Gb ports.

Yes, I am starting on a board next week sir. How is cradlepoint treating you?

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12 minutes ago, belusnecropolis said:

Yes, I am starting on a board next week sir. How is cradlepoint treating you?

Couldn't complain and IMO best solution that will work with other carriers.  I mainly use them for WAN failover solutions with static IP passthrough.  We use both Sprint and Verizon.  We have used it for remote VPN site to site where only T1s are the only option for internet.  Would love to see solution for Sprint B41 CA.

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I started working on the Raspberry Pi 3b Plus tonight with an Sierra Wireless em7565. This one has all those cool features that I was describing up top.

On 4/9/2018 at 9:22 AM, belusnecropolis said:

They feed into a router that will soon; tx AC Wifi on 2.4/5GHz and gsm on 900MHz. USB to ethernet bus for ~330mb p/s throughput over Ethernet. 5v means you can pretty much use this box anywhere. Has 2 more USB port for maybe forced air, another radio or peripherals. Bonus PoE too. Working out the kinks on software this week for the output side.

Not bad for ~39 bucks. I was waiting for a few open source firmwares to get through the compilebot6k's toobs; this one is built now. Some use modem manager or openWRT for the router side. This LTE radio is band(s) 2/26/41 capable on the Sprint side. Band 25 did not make the cut, but was on previous Sierra builds. This is a tester radio so there is a slight chance it will appear down the road. It has just about every other LTE band.  

This is an example of the debug screen. GMO is nearest so we only get 26 from a far site. No 41 in our zip yet. 
35gy.png

The best part is I can plug an MC7455(that would be Modem#2) or another EM7565 in and it can hop over to that or I can direct load balancing. I just wanted to show the EM7565 authenticated below.

35gz.png

Another shot of my terrible reception.

35h0.png

Here it is out of the armor.

35h6.jpg

So, we have a stable software image. I will get it built and add some GPS features, then test on band 41 in Myrtle where present. We have one site w 8t8r gear to test 3xCA on, so it might be a minute. I am in 2xCA MM areas through the week. I will see how it likes the Magic box too. 

I should have a true GB ethernet router to massacre in the next couple of weeks with software images already set to go. I can embed the radio beyond a USB adapter. It still requires m.2>mPCIe but that is one less failure point and better throughput. This was a great breakthrough in affordable and small solutions for us.  I have to go to bed and then work now.

Have a great week everyone.

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  • 4 weeks later...

3bxi.jpg

We moved our routing gear down from the attic. Super preliminary and half of these are testing builds for friends but had to get this posted. We are mounting the larger antennae/Cat6 as we go throughout the weeks ahead, the smaller Rpi homebrews are using the old Magic Box antenna. From L - R 1. Cat16 4xCA  mr1100 unlocked and uncased(!) to soon get at that 4x4 antenna goodness>switch. 2. Cat12 3xCA em7565>fast ethernet router/N wifi. 3. 2xCA>Raspberry Pi3b fast ethernet/n wifi. 4. 2xCA>RaspberryPi3bPLUS fast(er ~300MB p/s) ethernet/ACWiFI, I put that high speed heat sink on the radio after I got the 5GHz rolling. Neat!

3bxk.jpg

This spicy build is gigabit, AC1200 and currently working with a pair of 2x/cat 6 radios until my order for moar cat 12 gets here off the boat. 

When I get a day off ~next weekend I am looking forward to exploring that new IoT e~garage Sprint put together. I really should get in touch with whoever their dood is over there in IoT. They seem to actually be utilizing some neat tools and people. Anyhoo, I have to go to bed and then work. 

Have a fantastic weekend everyone.

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1 hour ago, xdfgf said:

This is fantastic stuff. Please continue. Subbing

Thanks!

We have some room to experiment, punch holes and patch. I am new to this and it is so much fun learning all this how to. It is worth the time to do it, why not share? I am at least good enough at aggregating how to information and like to get projects done. If you have ideas let me know.

I got back from Charlotte today, I took this guy. I like handing back the hotel WiFi info, I brought my own I know is not Krack vulnerable if I must go wireless.

3cf0.jpg

It worked great! Tower was a couple miles away, from the chatter I picked up a race was happening, the local High School Prom going on and lots of travelers, so the area was packed. 

3cf6.png

 

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3fqf.jpg

Quality shipment came to the post today. I had to get some more 3x cards before I could start on the gigabit build, they kind of show up as they come in so waiting for one moar to complete. I had one, but a friend of mine in Northernish MI needed some bandwidth and Sprint was the easiest option for them. Being one block outside the city limit they have DSL and DSL, seriously, they had to get two lines. So cat12>fast ethernet capable router and he is already creeping up to the limit on that with a pair of directional 11db radomes via 10ft coax, they are still indoors and not correctly polarized yet, so room to tune and they will be at 100 like that. 

Anyhoo, I will get this one mounted after I get the ordered adapters in. Waiting on some;

M.2>mPCIe, unless you are putting this in your PeeCee, you may need this.
mhf4>RP-SMA whips, all my stock gear and junkyard are ipex>SMA or N.
SMA>N-male coax, this will connect to the giant antenna, impressive length.
24' Steel pole>Giant antenna had to get something a little custom ordered I can mount to the house and plant in the ground, quality US steel and Flag. This part may take the longest. 

Fun summer ahead for the HOA and I, plus we are making one for the car next.

Have a great weekend everyone.
 
 

 

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23 hours ago, belusnecropolis said:

plus we are making one for the car next.

I ended up getting one of these together today before work. Boss travels a lot, Tmo service has a nice 2 hour deadspot in NC so I took that travel router up a couple of posts and added a short coax line to an omni, picked up VZW sim, added Verizon APN, programmed some band locking and she hands off smooth as silk while traveling. This was made a bit easier since Boss has a DC plug right on the dash, but I threw in an inverter just in case. 

That project was accelerated to say the least, woe is me now I have to buy another router!

 

;)

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Picked up a wg3526. 2Gb NIC, AC1200, SD card, USB 3.0. I stuck a 2x card in it when it came in last week to test. I got all those adapters last week for my 3x card so here is a how to in pictures to update to some cat12 goodness, then add the old card via USB3.0 for some 3x + 2x carrier aggregation goodness.

yayyy all of our gear is here. Need that m.2>mPCIe to get this chip going.
3hai.jpg

Add heat sinks and remove 3 screws to get your main board loose.

3hak.jpg

Freeeeeeeedom!!!!
3hal.jpg

Install adapter, make sure to screw from top down and trim plastic spacers, these will cause problems between PCB and case otherwise. 
3han.jpg

In to win

3hap.jpg

Like I said, upside down from the top and trim to fit. This is an adapter setting so you M U S T go Adapter>Spacers>Screws down or your m.2 card rubs on the insert.

3haq.jpg

L O O K I N G G O O D

3har.jpg

Tighten that baby down oh so gently. Insert your EM7565>mhf4>RP-SMA adapters in the slot where your IPEX>SMA adapters for your previous mPCIe card went. These are the direct left and right holes labeled FOURGEE on the outside of the case. Tighten and attach antenna.

3has.jpg
To be totally BA, make sure to reuse your old cat7 card by attaching to a project box, add some IPEX antenna, a USB/SIM slot adapter and win at the game of ugly modems and speed.
3hau.jpg

3hav.png

Have an amazing weekend everyone and post your build here.

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  • 1 month later...

I scratched up enough scratch to get that second cat12 card. I can get bands 2(5MHz), 4(10MHz), 5(10MHz) on Tmo at home. Top score is 75 there on externals.

I can get bands 2(15MHz), 4(10+5MHz), 30(10MHz), 12(10MHz) on ATT. Top score is 35 at home, they are a bit farther away so signal suffers, but are designing a flagpoletenna build to fix that :)  

We did score pretty sweet in the car the other day. Frank Sonata has more Mb p/s available here than MPH, jeez.

5ox5.jpg

Redundancy says go w two carriers, and they both have 10MHz of band 66 here to deploy yet. We will share results when I put it together and we master the wizardry of load balance and/or bonding. Will take time but should be super sweet if I could get 100x2 w some tuning. 

Hope everyone had a great, freedom packed ?? Independence Day ??. Have a great weekend everyone and keep building. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

One click firmware update smoked my nice, new Sierra Wireless card. Programming is hard I suppose, at Sierra Wireless. 

Excited about the Telit LM960 coming out. Comes in mPCIe format, 5xCA down, 4x4 MIM0 and 256 QAM, GPS and such. I applied for a free sample for our excellent lab. Price will probably be like 400 bucks so while they are handing them out I jumped in. That thing is going in a sweet rig for sure. 

Also, apparently I have to get a permit to erect a flagpole with a United States Flag on it in our backyard because government. Maybe that card will be out by then and we can build a neat antenna network.

https://www.telit.com/m2m-iot-products/cellular-modules/data-cards/

Have a great week everyone and hope you are all enjoying your summer.

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One click firmware update smoked my nice, new Sierra Wireless card. Programming is hard I suppose, at Sierra Wireless. 


I had a panic moment doing a firmware upgrade on my mc7455. As soon as it finished flashing, it it triggered a BSOD. Buggy Sierra Wireless upgrade driver apparently. Thankfully the firmware flashed OK.

For what it's worth, it's apparently possible to flash the modems with a third party open source Linux tool. It should be easy to install in Ubuntu 18.04, so you might want to try that route going forward. It might be more reliable.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

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I'm using a em7565 and recieve 3xCA just great in Kansas City.

 

I cross compiled modemmanager onto openwrt snapshot running 4.14 kernel and use qmi.  I didn't like the rooter package.  Too much scripts for stuff I didn't need.  I also wanted to be able to bridge the lan and wan for ip passthrough and it was not possible with rooter.  Modemmanager does it just fine.

 

It seems you must lock band 41 to get 3xCA or else you only receive 1 band of 41. 

 

EMM state: Registered 
RRC state: RRC Connected 

Normal Service 

IMS reg state: No Srv 
PCC RxM RSSl: -62 
PCC RxD RSSl: -65 
SCCI RxM RSSl: -77 
SCCI RxD RSSl: -79 
SCC2 RxM RSSl: -77 
SCC2 RxD RSSl: -80 
Tx Power: 
RSRQ (dB): -l0.8 

PCC RxM RSRP: -95 
PCC RxD RSRP: -97 
SCCI RxM RSRP: -96 
SCCI RxD RSRP: -99 
SCC2 RxM RSRP: -95 
SCC2 RxD RSRP: -98 

2639(9785) 
Cell ID: 04d4be33 (81051 187) 

TAC: 

Edited by Kearney
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On 7/31/2018 at 3:09 PM, Kearney said:

I'm using a em7565 and recieve 3xCA just great in Kansas City.

 

I cross compiled modemmanager onto openwrt snapshot running 4.14 kernel and use qmi.  I didn't like the rooter package.  Too much scripts for stuff I didn't need.  I also wanted to be able to bridge the lan and wan for ip passthrough and it was not possible with rooter.  Modemmanager does it just fine.

 

It seems you must lock band 41 to get 3xCA or else you only receive 1 band of 41. 

 

EMM state: Registered 
RRC state: RRC Connected 

Normal Service 

IMS reg state: No Srv 
PCC RxM RSSl: -62 
PCC RxD RSSl: -65 
SCCI RxM RSSl: -77 
SCCI RxD RSSl: -79 
SCC2 RxM RSSl: -77 
SCC2 RxD RSSl: -80 
Tx Power: 
RSRQ (dB): -l0.8 

PCC RxM RSRP: -95 
PCC RxD RSRP: -97 
SCCI RxM RSRP: -96 
SCCI RxD RSRP: -99 
SCC2 RxM RSRP: -95 
SCC2 RxD RSRP: -98 

2639(9785) 
Cell ID: 04d4be33 (81051 187) 

TAC: 

This sounds groovy. Feel free to share your software, I know a ton of folks on this build these days. I have two.

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On 8/1/2018 at 7:20 PM, belusnecropolis said:

This sounds groovy. Feel free to share your software, I know a ton of folks on this build these days. I have two.

Nothing to share really unless you wanted a specific build for your router from my linux build machine.  I use a netgear nighthawk r7800 and an em7565.  Stable openwrt 18.01 is on 4.14 kernel and supports qmi with raw ip just fine.

Also you didn't ruin that em7565 you tried to flash.   You need to first update to an intermediate firmware (1.05.xx.xx)  then flash the newest firmware(1.09.xx.xx) twice in a row and it will work just fine.  You may need to fix your impref back to "GENERIC" before you reflash as well.

Edited by Kearney
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  • 1 month later...
27 minutes ago, Kearney said:

Anyone having issues with 3xCA with the em7565?  Mine used to work great, then 3 days ago nothing but packet losses once the 3rd carrier kicks in.  If I keep it at on 2xca all is well. 

What firmware? I had a unit basically unusable to broken on 3xCA, switched it to T-mo. Since they don't do 2+4 I kind of lost 3x on that unit in a 2+4+12 only area but it runs great now.

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23 minutes ago, belusnecropolis said:

What firmware? I had a unit basically unusable to broken on 3xCA, switched it to T-mo. Since they don't do 2+4 I kind of lost 3x on that unit in a 2+4+12 only area but it runs great now.

The newest generic firmware for the em7565 is what I'm using. So your em7455 was physically messed up?  Using a different em7565 fixed the issue? 

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On 7/24/2018 at 11:01 PM, belusnecropolis said:

One click firmware update smoked my nice, new Sierra Wireless card. Programming is hard I suppose, at Sierra Wireless. 
 

I also had mine get stuck in qdloader.  If you haven't gotten it fixed let me know.  I have a procedure that unbricks them.

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This was on 1.5  firmware. The unit just became inoperable on Sprint, I tried so many firmwares and fixes in rooter. I just ditched Sprint on that unit.

1 minute ago, Kearney said:

I also had mine get stuck in qdloader.  If you haven't gotten it fixed let me know.  I have a procedure that unbricks them.

3 minutes ago, Kearney said:

The newest generic firmware for the em7565 is what I'm using. So your em7455 was physically messed up?  Using a different em7565 fixed the issue? 

ZOMG I have had one bricked for months. I do not have a Linux PeeCee to try the DanielWood fix, but if I could configure a Pi I have several. I tried it today in windows, activating the .EXE and removing the radio>m.2-mPCIe>USB adapter and now it won't even see the QDL or whatever. It just shows as a broken sensor.

I can't receive mail because 20 extra feet of water so if you have a fix I am all for hearing it.

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