EE SIM in Mikrotik 4g lte

[pipebanfan]

I live in a rural area so I bought a Mikrotik 4g LTE antenna. 

I had a 4g SIM with 100gb for £35 that worked great for 2 years. That contract ended so I got a new we sim, 120gb for £20. Brought it home, popped it in, worked fine. 

A couple of weeks later it stopped working in the LTE antenna. 

Tried new antenna SIM in my phone & it worked fine. Put my phone SIM in antenna & antenna worked fine. Switched them back & antenna SIM wouldn't work in antenna. 

Went to ee shop & they gave me a new SIM. Came home, popped it in antenna, worked fine for a couple of weeks but has stopped working again. 

Guy in the shop mentioned something about ee rebooting something every month that may have knocked it off. 

Anyone else experiencing problems with new ee sims in Mikrotik antenna? 

[EssexBoyEE]

Just another thought on this SIM swop thingy, if your Router is an older LTE CAT4 spec there's a good chance it will take either a Full Size or Micro SIM in its Sim Slot where as your Mobile, I'm guessing, is either Micro or a Nano SIM Slot.

Point I'm trying to make here is are you needing to use SIM Adapters to use the Sims in the Router, and if so, how are you doing this and by what method, is there a chance that the Sims are not sitting correctly in the Routers SIM Slot

[mikeliuk]

Hi @pipebanfan ,

The general rule is that if you hit a problem, someone else on the internet has hit it first.

I did a quick search for "Mikrotik lhg sim stopped working" and there are similar reports such as

https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=169684

but on the same page there is a report that EE SIMs are known-good.

This may not match your device exactly, but I get the impression there should be a lot of functionality to obtain logs. From browsing related links, I see certain of the devices can even lock to a single cell tower.

As the SIM works in the phone but not in the Mikrotik and this is already a replacement SIM and presumably follows the same pattern, the issue appears to follow the Mikrotik and could be as simple as the suggestion above.

Personally speaking, I have a Netgear MR1100 which I rely on for working from home as my house internet. If the same circumstances were to happen to me, I would be forced to replace the device immediately or at least put one on order to test suitability.

In your case, you should check the SINR seen on your phone for the EE network both in your living room and loft location. If these numbers are safely above 10 dB, you would not need the directional antenna functionality.

The Mikrotik software seems to have a lot of functionality to diagnose things and you could perform a factory reset and update to the latest firmware and check various outputs and logs. It depends on whether you have the enthusiasm and time to do this.

It's near impossible to be sure of any fault at this stage but nothing of what you have described seems like normal behaviour. The device functions for weeks and presumably becomes faulty without you touching it, and this has happened twice.

Perhaps it's related to devices in loft spaces reaching over 60 Celsius this summer or exceeding ambient operating temperatures, but at a certain point you may need to consider what the wisest option might be. Hope things work out ok.

I guess one thing I would do if I owned the device is to try to find out why the device has a problem with the SIM and there should be a log which shows an error line. (If the SIM had become entirely bricked, I was leaning towards throwing out the device, but as the SIM functions elsewhere, you should see a reason and an error to explain lack of functionality.)