Will a 3 Antenna Wireless N Router work with only 1 Antenna?

Question

I am using 2 Wireless G routers but am planning to buy a Wireless N network to get more speed. But my network right now is like this:
I connect 2 areas together, "Office" and "Home".
Office has DSL internet and "Home" has no DSL but I can access the Office internet from home by wlan.

Will this work also with a Wireless N network like this:?

so as you can see, I want to use 2 Wireless N routers which have 3 antennas. I will replace one antenna by a directional antenna like in the picture.

my question, will this work? or should I use 3 directional antennas? What is the meaning of 3 antennas? what are they for? If this will work what speed can I expect?

Answer 1

It should work. The three antennas give diversity and permit spacial multiplexing. You will not get the full rate the router is capable of, as it will be unable to multiplex on the link between the two routers, but you should have working connectivity.

Just be warned -- some routers have one receive-only antenna. You can't replace that one with a directional antenna. So if it doesn't work, try a different antenna connector.

Answer 2

In theory this could work, but;

• You won't be able to use mutiple spatial streams, (at least not at the home side for traffic from the office side and vice versa) so you are already losing one of the biggest benefits of 802.11n.

• You are essentially using you're home router as a repeater, which halves the bandwidth for wireless clients connected to the home router.

• You also run risk of picking up a lot of interference because you would combine omni-directional and direction antennas on the same radio, which is never a good idea.

If you were to use 2 single radio 802.11n routers my best guesstimate would be that you'd be lucky to get 10mbit wirelessly from traffic comming from the other side.

I'd look at using a dedicated point 2 point solution.

Answer 3

This doesn't quite answer your question but could be an option.

I found this three-pronged omni-directional antenna to give me significant signal improvement.

TP-Link TL-ANT2403N

The only draw back is it's limited to a 1.0m cable as anything longer would cause too much signal loss.