Wireless Joint

Came back to find information on how I made this work. I should have posted a followup.

Basically, after I got this all set up, I realized that there's no legit way to get an unlimited data plan on AT&T or Verizon. Sprint/T-Mobile has no tower anywhere close to me. Starlink put a nail in this ...

I'll sign up the second they offer it to me.

I wouldn't underestimate what the pi is capable of, especially the pi4. The pi4 has gigabit lan and usb 3.0 and there is firmware for all versions of the pi floating around. It was even powerful enough to run OMR which I had used to bond 4 separate providers and use as my main home router. Only ...

I'll warn you all that there's no production-ready "canned" router software for the RPi4. There is a daily snapshot of OpenWRT, and a couple of community builds.

If you want to build a RPi4 router, see my build thread in the Open Discussion section.

Update: I've been testing some more. When left to defaults, the modem will do carrier aggregation with band 66 and some other band which escapes me at the moment. I do remember that the secondary band was one of the 700-800Mhz bands. This resulted in download speeds of around 16Mb, but upload speeds ...

I now believe my huge latency was caused by the modem overheating. I noticed that while I was testing the EM7655 went to 65 degrees.

After powering down for a while and back up, the latencies were back to normal values.

gscheb wrote: Sun Oct 18, 2020 8:18 pm By chance are you using a booster?

No. Raspberry Pi4 running OpenWRT. Sierra Wireless EM7565 in a USB3 M.2 enclosure (with extra USB connection for extra power). Two Wilson Electric yagi antennas.

R1250GSA wrote: Mon Oct 19, 2020 9:28 am I do not see any grounding of your roof setup.
It looks like a very juicy lightning rod.

I have a couple of VERY tall trees close to the house and the antenna should fall within the cone of protection of those trees. However, I am going to add a ground just to be safe, just haven't done it yet.

OUTSTANDING!
Well played Dr. Frankenstein.

What are the speeds now that the smoke has settled?
Which carrier?
Any lessons learned from your modem choice, the Sierra CAT-12?

Yes, I would like to see your Perl scripts.


Right now, I'm testing with a business class AT&T SIM using the i2gold APN ...

Nice work, do you have a better picture of how your mast is attached to the roof?


I made the telescoping post from two pieces of metal tubing from Home Depot that fit one inside the other almost perfectly. One was a section of electrical conduit and the other a chain link fence top rail section ...

Perl scripts can be found here: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjjTUdb1APffjjDKI5W ... Q?e=TO8gKe

I'm running OpenWRT on a raspberry pi4 with a EM7565 modem attached via a USB enclosure. I find that after powering up, the modem may or may not respond to commands, or may respond partially. Sending an "AT" to the modem does not get an echo, but the modem will reply "OK".

Here's the really odd ...

I've got my RPI4/EM7565 router up for testing. I'm seeing RSSI in the -77dB to -85dB range. Speetest.net and fast.com shows me getting 10-12 Mb downloads and 2 up, which I'm thrilled with (my DSL is 3Mb/768k).

What I'm not thrilled with is latency. Both speedtest and fast.com reports my latency at ...

It's alive! Frankenrouter (as I've come to call it) is put together and installed.

IMG_5604.JPG

Inside is the Raspberry Pi 4B, the USB3 M.2 enclosure with a Sierra Wireless 7565. Also notice the heat management system. I drilled some tiny holes in the bottom of the case (you can see the inlet ...

That's weird - I updated the thread a while back, but the update is gone.

The project has felt like one step forward and two steps back.

Anyway, after the initial indoor testing, I tried taking the rig up on the roof but a slight mishap ripped both antenna wires out of the connectors. I decided no ...

Ok, time to update the build thread. I received my Sierra Wireless MC7565. I've been waiting for The Wireless Haven to open to buy their M2. USB3 enclosure, but I went ahead and bought a cheapo M.2 adapter off Amazon figuring I could at least get the modem software updated, which did indeed work ...

Some things to report:

Wifi is broken in the RPi4 builders of OpenWRT. There's some patches that fix this issue in the mainstream linux kernel needed to fix this, but they haven't made it over into the OpenWRT version yet. I'm not using wifi, so no worries for me, but I thought I'd pass it along.

I'll be using it on AT&T. But whenever I see posts about upgrading firmware, I usually see "generic" referenced.

Thanks! I'll check it out!

These statements were true at least about a week ago. I haven't looked lately.

There's no GoldenOrb release for the RPi4.
There's no stable OpenWRT release for RPi4.
The RPi3 image will NOT run on an RPI4.
The RPi 2 image *might* run on a RPi4 in 32 bit mode (I've not confirmed).

There is a daily ...

I set out on an adventure to dump my 3Mb/768k DSL in favor of LTE data. Little did I know the depth and breadth of the rabbit hole I was about to plunge into.

My first big break was finding @swwifty's thread in this forum on building his router. Inspired by his RPi 3 build, I decided to replicate ...

You should be able to compile a modemmanager build of the snapshot and get it going without full goldenorb... If you've never setup a Linux build environment, though, be prepared for some trial & error... If using a virtual machine under windows, be sure to allocate plenty of hard drive space, as ...

...
I'm also toying with the idea of scrapping the RPi and associated software and instead use pfsense on a small x86 system....


pfsense is almost certainly out of the running. The only way FreeBSD (the OS under pfsense) supports LTE modems is via ppp. That limits performance to the 20mb/sec ...

Well, this project is just increasing in suck at every corner. I put together my final build list and started ordering. The RPi, PoE hat and aux USB 3 cable got ordered on Amazon.

I went to order the modem and USB enclosure from netshop to find that they've shut down to take inventory. No firm ETA ...

Another option: don't use the cheapest possible injector... 16w is very very low-end.. 30w is still fairly cheap, and 60w exists... You can also use 2 usb cables from the pi to the enclosure (1 for power + data and 1 for extra power only).


It's not that simple. The old 100mb method of PoE was ...

You need to be careful here. There are two common PoE specs: IEEE 802.3af-2003 and IEEE 802.3at-2009. The af flavor only supplies 16 Watts of power. The at flavor supplies 25 Watts.

If you want more than 16 Watts (actually only 12.5W at the device), you need to insure that your PoE splitter and ...

More info:

According to the chart about 3/4 of the way down this page https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/faqs/, a pi 4B under load draws 1.25A. That, with the 900mA for my modem would be a max of 2.15A.

The PoE "hat" for the RPi says it can do 2.5A. That *should* leave a safety margin of ...

Another option: don't use the cheapest possible injector... 16w is very very low-end.. 30w is still fairly cheap, and 60w exists... You can also use 2 usb cables from the pi to the enclosure (1 for power + data and 1 for extra power only).


OK, I figured this out - I think. The RPi 4 comes ...

I'm looking at using GoldenOrb on a RPI 4B and a Sierra Wireless EM7565 modem in a USB enclosure, but I'm wondering about power requirements. The RPi can be powered by PoE, and the modem is powered over USB.

This would be mounted in an enclosure on the antenna mast.

I looked at the EM7565 data ...

Interesting. I've was trying to sign up with a somewhat local provider for AT&T 400GB service. I was all ready to pull the trigger and they informed my that they were "out" of AT&T. They could only sign me up for their cheaper T-Mobile plan.

May be some truth to the rumor.

Wow! I've been trying for days to make sense of all the LTE gumbo since I started down this rabbit hole a few days ago. Your thread is master's thesis worth of material. Thank you so much for sharing! I've been looking for a tried and true rural setup, and your's fits the bill perfectly (except I'm ...