Issue with Photon and External Duck Antenna

Hardware
1

I have two distinct projects with Photons running different firmware and different OS versions. Both are outdoors.

One is running OS 0.6.3 with a particle duck antenna. It is fairly far from the WiFi access point, and it is behind a wooden wall, but gets a good signal and is currently at -63dBm. No issues with this device.

The other Photon is newer and is running OS 2.3.1. It also has the same duck antenna, which was purchased at the same time as the other antenna from the Particle store. This device is much closer to the WiFi access point and has minimal obstructions. It, however, has terrible WiFi performance. Signal strength is about -77dBm and quality is under 20. With the duck antenna I cannot get it to work much at all. Switching the firmware to use the internal antenna improves the signal strength to around -73dBm and it works somewhat reliably.

I don’t understand why the external antenna would be so much worse than the internal antenna, and perform worse than the other device that is farther away and has obstructions.

My question is, is there an issue with OS 2.3.1 with the external duck antenna that was introduced sometime after 0.6.3?

2

Hey Joseph, another question is this:
have you tried switching the antennas to rule out a bad one/bad connector, etc?

(I’m shooting in the dark)

3

I have Photons with external antennas running 2.x and they get a better signal than with the internal, so I’m pretty sure ANT_EXT works.

However there’s a huge difference between 0.6.x and 2.x. Actually, there’s even a big jump between 0.6.3 and 0.7.0 because there was a major upgrade in WICED, the Wi-Fi stack implementation, so it’s hard to say where the problem might be.

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4

I’m beginning to think it is a bad antenna or connector. I will pick up a newer one in the Particle store and see where that leads. Thanks

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5

I purchased a new external antenna from the Particle store (not a duck) and the issue has been resolved. Very strong signal now. Must have been a bad duck. Thanks to everyone for the help.

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6

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