Long Ranger Antenna (BT974822) | Parabolic - Over 20 Miles Range | All Cell Bands: 5G, 4G, LTE | WiFi 2.4/5 GHz WiFi 6 | High Gain Cellular/WiFi Antenna up to +28 dB | All Carriers

It is worth mentioning that I live very rural in the agricultural deep south US. Cell towers with Verizon antennas are 4.9 and 6.9 miles from me. There is no wired internet in my area, the latency on the satellite internet is very high, I was on the waiting list for Starlink for a year before this solved my problem. Inside my house I have zero bars on Samsung Galaxy phones. Outside I can occasionally get enough service for a voice call and SMS, but MMS and the internet was largely unusable except under ideal conditions. I am a techy and I approach things in a logical manner to troubleshoot and tune. I have been working with this setup for over a year and I am quite comfortable with it.I installed my Celfi Go X system with the included plastic covered Yagi antenna and I was able to successfully hit the tower without a good line of sight. There are some far away trees on the horizon that make it tricky to hit this tower at 4.9 miles. After running the system the same way and tuning things in to get the best carrier frequency I ultimately found that while my signal strength was good, my signal quality was so low that operation became unstable. Signal quality is king. Testing proved that I could get better internet throughput when I used a carrier frequency with higher quality even with little to no signal strength.Armed with the above I present the Celfi Go app dashboard as evidence. The first 3 images are snapshots of the old antenna showing the fluctuations in strength and quality. This did allow for a good amount of online gaming when paired with my Cudy LT500 router and Verizon SIM card. (Update: Ditched the CUDY LT 500 for a Taktikal 1600 to allow for some nerd level customization. I still use the CUDY but for running cameras not facing the internet.) The most annoying thing with the fluctuations was the constant disconnecting and reconnecting of the phones switching frequencies. The Cudy router allowed me to select and lock onto a band and channel. The final image with signal quality in the 80% range is with the Long Ranger installed. This translates into a reliable 14 mbps down and 4 mbps up. (Update: Depending on time of day I have hit peaks of 25 mbps with 19 mbps sustained. I can download many GB games in just a few hours.) It seldom deviates from this even in nasty rainy weather. This allows for VOIP, video calling, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and gaming with no buffering or excessive lag. My kids do homeschooling without issue and we have made our neighbors jealous with our ability to rent movies online and watch them instantly in 4k. Needless to say, movie night is at our house.As far as the installation goes, I have this antenna mounted above my roofline on a metal pipe. There are some trees in the way, but they are off in the distance by about a mile. Once beyond them it is relatively clear to the tower. For $200 you cannot go wrong adding this to your system, but you need to be patient. The farther the tower the more sensitive direction is. I have roughly 8 degrees of movement before the signal is affected. I spun it to hit a farther tower as an experiment and it is tighter, around 5 degrees of movement before signal is affected. The important part is that I can hit another tower if I want to or need to. I ran for about a month on another tower at 751 mhz and it was solid and reliable until some network changes took place. I suddenly started having quality issues. I spun back to my original tower and everything was back to normal with 80% quality. I will update this as necessary.Update 06AUG2023!Had an issue with a cable that had a bad crimp. I do not think it came with the antenna though so no product issues there. I ordered a new one and everything got back to normal. This antenna does catch a little bit of wind so I have had it get spun on my antenna holder I made. I would recommend that you mount this to something pretty stout. Also, lightning took out a local tower. The generator failed so the tower was just out. I was able to re-aim it and hit the farther 7 mile tower with ease and continue on as normal. This really is a killer antenna. If you cannot hit what you need to with this I am not sure where to go from here. Bonus points, I have seen this exact antenna being used in Florida that appears to be a point to point communication system having to do with weigh stations or agriculture inspection stations at the state lines. It is nice to know this is a commercial level antenna .

I have been using this dish for about 8 months now for my primary internet connection.Some details about my situation: I live in a remote area where the nearest cell tower is about 5 miles away. My booster is a cell fi go X. My carrier is Verizon. I have mounted the dish on the side of my house high up near the roof line.Note: parabolic antenna is really suited to the application I mention above, you have one particular tower you are trying to hit at great distance. This antenna will pretty much not pick up any other towers in the area. If you want general directionality at a lesser distance a yagi style antenna is better. If you want to pick up all signals in an area of pretty good coverage (maybe a metal roof scenario) you will want an Omni directional antenna.Ok, so how does it work: to put in perspective, without any booster I get just about 1 bar, and almost no internet data and frequent dropped calls.With the yagi that my booster came with I was getting up to 2-3 bars but crucially data remained at a max of 10 mb down and only 1 up.With this parabolic antenna I now get a pretty solid 30 mega down and up to 6 up. Calls are much clearer with only the occasional drop.The thing I am most impressed with is that it has been pretty stable, you can expect some variability in cell signal and with weather. But this was much more stable than the yagi.Tips for installation. You will need to hit the tower pretty dead on and have it just about perfectly level. Being off just a few degrees will dramatically effect performance. In my case just between some trees I can actually see the tower so I know I am right on target. If you have really dense tree cover this antenna may not boost as much.One tip about the booster, this may be specific to cel fi go. It sweeps a bunch of different bands and frequencies, you can specify up front which band and frequencies to disable, if you look up what your tower uses it can save you a lot of time trying to figure out if you are connecting. Trust me you are going to be moving it slightly scanning, moving it scanning again.Another pro tip. I’ll often switch airplane mode on and off when I get home to make sure I’m tuned in to my booster perfectly. When you are out and about your phone may jump to some other frequencies and toggling that forces it to sweep for the strong signal again.At the end of the day I was able to get this combo of booster and antenna configured such that I have a usable internet connection through my cell hotspot of around 30mb down and 6mb up, contrasted to my max through dsl of 10/1 (wonderful American internet). It also makes phone calls easier to hear and rarely drops.

Purchased this setup to solve my weak cell issue...if there is a 0 star, I would pick that :1. In assembling the 2 half's, had major issues with aligning the 4 bolts. This unit was not made to specs and wa sonly able to align 2 botls..in addition, the metal had sharp, very sharp edges on the inside runs, so i cut my finger because if this......2. After all that and connecting to my booster, I got the same more or least as I have with my old small antenna...no long range gain ?3. I called Bolton tech support and the call was s joke, after they took all my info, he then said he can't help with the item as ot was purchased from Amazon and Amazon should solve my technical problems. Hmm?As such I am returning this thing and wasted so much time and money to setup up ( cable, adapters and the pole to install we're items i bought )