[alabastervlog]

My newest router doesn't have any of that shit and works just as well, with at least as much range, as the one it replaced, which had six(!) of those insectoid antenna things.

I wouldn't be surprised if the damn antennas are just empty. They don't seem to serve any purpose.

[namibj]

They aren't for range, but for MIMO (exploiting that the signal bounces differently between the antennas either end of the connection, while some antenna pairs behave poorly, others may well be perfect, so it essentially matches them (through a mixing matrix, to be more abstract/generic) to form good pairs that are also independent from another, so they can simultaneously run different data streams over different antennas to severely increase speed.

It also compensates for interference dead spots when you hold your phone into such a spot.

The long sticks typically radiate in the plane normal to the stick, i.e., if you make them all perfectly vertical, they are focused to the same floor. Individual ones can be rotated readily to cover special spots, especially if you have more than 4 antenna.

[eqvinox]

> The long sticks typically radiate in the plane normal to the stick, i.e., if you make them all perfectly vertical, they are focused to the same floor.

I generally recommend just maximizing angles between them, i.e. 90° between 2 or 3 antennas. Wall attenuation & reflections will equalize it out, and you have a lower chance of dead zones. The ≥4th one —on the same radio— is YOLO. Annoyingly enough, for some devices they don't tell you which antenna is on which radio.

[eqvinox]

Considering a single radio, the antennas are for MIMO, which in theory is supposed to multiply bandwidth by number of antennas (i.e. 3 antennas = 3× bandwidth). In practice this is highly reliant on signal propagation characteristics in your rooms, particularly including position (and angle!) of all antennas (both senders and receivers). The second antenna is useful, third maybe, fourth is gonna be quite questionable.

However, they also have more than 1 radio these days, and sharing the antennas on them not exactly beneficial; if you have one 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz radio each, you might as well optimize the antennas for each radio. And even if it's the same band, separate antennas allow you to have distinct radios cover distinct space with different RF propagation characteristics.

(They're not empty, or at least I haven't found any fake ones yet.)

[protocolture]

I wish I knew more about RF engineering to comment, but the impression I get is that they cause more problems with interference than they solve.