Often I have to use my Huawei E176 (which I previously described) inside an area not so well covered by HSDPA signal: in order to increase the bandwith I can use, I bought a 5 dBi GPRS/UMTS antenna.
Does it work well? Answering is measuring. :)
Thanks to the very good list of AT commands written by Fredrik Lindberg, I was able to determine the power increase of the received signal: passing a simple AT+CSQ to my modem through Minicom, I got a number in the RSSI scale.
The sequence to convert it to Watt is:
dBm = (RSSI * 2) - 113W = (10 ^ (x / 10)) / 1000
For example, without the antenna, one of the RSSI values I got with AT commands was 3.99, while with the antenna it increased to 8.99, so:
3.99 RSSI => -105,02 dBm => 3.14 * 10 ^ -14 W
8.99 RSSI => - 95,02 dBm => 3.14 * 10 ^ -13 W
The power of the signal received by the system with the antenna was ten times greater than without it.
