Hi David
I am curious to know if you got to the bottom of your problem with the Nighthawk?
I bought a used one on ebay and as you know they are not cheap, cost me £240 even used! But I had heard such good things about them, particularly their ability to pick up very weak mobile signals. I'm out in rural France at present, and my wife who was at home at the time, brought it back with her.
Initially it seemed fine, and connected to Orange which is the only decent signal here, between 1-3 bars generally though at times it just drops out comepletely! We also sometimes pick up BT (Boughgy Telecom) and Free, but they are very poor signals. Anyway to cut a long story short I started having the same problem that you described, constantly 'searching' and finding nothing, tried auto and manual searching, no difference.
But I was fortunate enough to still have my old router, it's a Huawei mains powered model, still the same idea you insert the sim card and away you go. So I had the advantage of being able to compare them side by side as it were, as I also have two EE sims and the one I use in the router has unlimited data. I also tried antenna, though the old huawei (that cost me less than £20 on ebay last year) was just using the little stick antenna on the back. I tried that and two outdoor antenna that I have, shoved 15 feet in the air to try to get some coverage, but nothing doing. It was like chalk and cheese, the Huawei connected to Orange straight away with 1 or 2 bars and was fine for watching iplayer, Netflix etc. The Netgear Nighthawk still 'searching'.
I did all the usual reboots, even factory reset, to no avail. On exploring the menu I noticed something interesting. When you go into advanced settings and then I think cellular, it brings up the page where you can choose auto or manual scanning. And on that page there are two little boxes that you have to have ticked, one is data and the other is roaming. But with both of them ticked, you go into the page called diagnostics and the info says Roaming: Off. What? Go back a page, yes the boxes are still ticked but when you look at diagnostics it says Roaming: Off. I decided that was the crux of my problem.
So I decided that the thing was faulty and fortunately I'm well within the time frame to return it to the seller so I'm in the process of that now. But naturally I looked up the problem and hence saw your post and it seems there are a few people complaining of exactly the same problem. I just wonder if there is an answer or if when they are a few years old they develop this fault? Anyway I thought I'd share my experience with you!
Cheers
