Looking for suggestions

[agrosso]

Hello everybody. I am new on the forum, hope not to be off-topic in this section.
Please consider me a complete newbie in networking and wireless.
I live in a rural area in Italy and I am experimenting with 4g-lte connection at home, obtained by slapping together this equipment:

1. LTE antenna
https://www.amazon.it/14dBi-Outdoor-Ant ... 3ASonstige

(with 10 meters cable)

2. Huawei USB dongle E3372

3. Raspberry Pi 3B acting as router, with raspbian Jessie.


Up to now I was able to get peak values of 30mbps in download, which is absolutely not impressive but fits my needs, and gives a decent speed in an area where you hardly get 6-7mbps from any cable connection.

Anyway I would not be unhappy of trying to improve the system a bit. Here are my thoughts.

- positioning the antenna was mainly a minimum-effort action. I looked for a point on the house's highest balcony where I could get the best signal with my mobile phone. Maybe I can dare to position it on the roof in spring/summer. However I think I need to perform some precise measure about the quality of the signal. What instruments would I need? How can I evaluate the losses on the cable (which is a bit longer than needed)?

- Is there any point in switching from the dongle to a regular modem? E3372 is a cat. 4 modem. The sim card that I am currently using is speed-capped at 30mbps, but I had a chance of using a Teltonika RUT950 with an uncapped sim and it did not deliver more. A cat. 6 modem can push the speed theoretically up to 300mbps (with an uncapped sim and perfect signal...), but I guess this is done by carrier aggregation? If so, we are probably covered by Band 20 only and there would be not much to aggregate. Am I wrong?

-In case I discover significant losses on the cable, would it make sense to build an outdoor modem, located near the antenna? Several lte modules have operating temperature ranges that extend well below zero.


Thanks in advance for any kind of suggestion.

Bye,
Andrea