Hi,

I help out with the webcam setup at a local club ski field near Fairlie (Fox Peak). We have an old 3G router (WRT54G3G with Merlin U630 card) that connects to the Vodafone cell tower on Mt Michael.

It's clear line-of-sight to the tower, and the distance is about 20-22km. Yes, I realise that is a long way. We can get a "Good" GPRS signal, and can connect reliably, but over GPRS out transmit speed is only 1-2KBps. (kilobytes per second as measured by the FTP webcam image transfer speeds), and we have issues with transmission failures.

The card is a 3G card, but it won't establish a 3G connection. On the router, if I set the connection to "HSDPA/3G/UMTS only", it reports that it gets a "HSDPA/3G/UMTS" carrier, with "Good" signal strength, but it just won't establish a connection. It seems to be trying, but it doesn't succeed. 

We have just added an external antenna (see photo), but it doesn't seem to make much difference.

Is it maybe something to do with frequencies? Is the Mt Michael tower only 900MHz, and the card maybe only does 2100MHz (for UMTS/3G)? (according to a manual I found, but I'm not sure if that applies to the NZ version of the card).

Is it a protocol thing? I would think not, as it's a "NZ Vodafone" version of the card.

Does anyone have insight as to what might be preventing the connection on 3G?  An iPhone 4 in the same location as the router can get a good 3G signal (3/4 bars), sufficient for a Whatsapp call and remote access at the same time.

Cheers,

Mike.