Any Replacement Antennas for the R7000 Worth Looking at?

[Mak]

Are there any replacement antennas that are worth swapping the OEM ones out for to get better signal and possible better throughput?

 

[sfx2000]

Actually the ones that Netgear provides are fairly decent...

Location of the AP relative to the clients is more important - and bigger antenna's on the AP cause more problems than they solve - e.g. the clients don't have any more to give, and the big antenna's can actually cause adjacent AP's to interfere and slow down traffic for everyone...

 

[tenderchkn]

Sorry to hijack the thread, but I have a related question.

I just received a used R7000 from eBay, and on first inspection, I realized that the antennas are not the OEM Netgear ones. The ones received were round, and the Netgear antennas seem to be rectangular shaped. I called Netgear, but they said that antennas are not available to be purchased separately. The only ones that I can find which claim to be OEM on eBay are from China, so that probably isn't a good bet.

I didn't get a chance to do much testing, but I did fire up inSSIDer and found that both the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz signal was -31dB from 2 feet away, but the 5Ghz signal dropped to -70dB 40 feet away, while the 2.4Ghz signal dropped altogether. This is with the router running on the latest stock firmware (1.0.4.30).

My options now are to purchase new antennas or to return the unit. Which 3rd party antennas would you guys recommend? Or are there other places where I can score some OEM antennas?

 

[avtella]

I wonder if you actually got an R6400 instead of the R7000... The R6400 has a different antenna design and is not replaceable, both use a similar casing though.

 

[tenderchkn]

No, it's definitely a R7000. The antennas are detachable, and both the bottom of the router and the web interface confirms that it is a R7000.

 

[avtella]

No, it's definitely a R7000. The antennas are detachable, and both the bottom of the router and the web interface confirms that it is a R7000.

Well that's good then.

Take a look at this:
Netgear R7000 Wireless SMA Antenna for D Link Linksys Belkin Routers | eBay

 

[tenderchkn]

Thanks! I saw those too, but once again, they're from China so there's no way to know if they are genuine. Based on the photos, do they look exactly like your antennas?

 

[avtella]

Yes my antennas look just like that.

I used to order OEM stuff from China via AliExpress such as laptop LCD cables etc (as in exact same ones as original), as lot of the contracted manufacturers for name brands are in China, you get almost wholesale rates at times. You could try that site.

 

[TonyH]

Well that's good then.

Take a look at this:
Netgear R7000 Wireless SMA Antenna for D Link Linksys Belkin Routers | eBay

Picture looks like genuine ones for R7000.