Disclaimer: Waveform provided one unit free of charge for our review.
Cellular Home Internet is pretty great for a lot of people. At least in some places, it’s disrupting the monopolies regional or national ISPs have held for decades, and providing better and faster internet. Of course, the disruptors are also giant corporations which would be perfectly fine having their own monopoly, but more options are always better.
LTE or 5G Home Internet isn’t all perfect, though. The gateway the carrier sends out is usually pretty limited and locked down, which is a constant source of frustration for more technical users. And, being based on radio waves, it’s prone to signal and speed fluctuations as the weather and the seasons change. One thing that can help mitigate signal issues is an external antenna. Just having a separate antenna that you can position can really help with signal strength and speed.
And that’s what this review is about. The Waveform Quad Mini is Waveform’s cheaper antenna option (compared to the Quad Pro, which I also reviewed). With the differences ranging from size to performance to use-case, the Quad Mini is positioned as more of a budget antenna option meant to compete with “cheap” antennas from other brands and even direct from carriers.
What’s in the box?
The hardware that comes with the Quad Mini depends on whether you order the full kit or “just the antenna”. I say “just the antenna” in quotes, since Waveform calls it “antenna only”, but it probably comes with pretty much everything you need.
For $119.99, you get the antenna (of course), a manual, a tabletop stand, a mount to attach to a pole, suction cups for attaching to a window, and a set of screws and anchors for attaching directly to a wall.
The full kit meanwhile comes in at $219.99, and with that you also get the Window Entry Cable, some U.FL-to-SMA adapters, and a 10ft UltraFlex cable. Add another $30 to that and you can get the UltraPole too.
For a lot of people, though, especially if you’re going to mount the antenna indoors, the $119.99 “antenna only” should be enough. The wires coming out of the antenna are nice and long, meaning you shouldn’t have much trouble putting it in a window with the gateway on a table below.
I personally only used the suction cups to mount my Quad Mini, but it’s nice that the other options are just included. A desktop stand is probably the “worst” option of the bunch, but it should still be better than internal gateway antennas. Including pole and wall mounting options just adds extra flexibility.
As for the hardware in the complete kit, I’m going to point to my review of the Quad Pro. The extra hardware is identical between the two antennas, so you can read more about it all there.
My Setup
I decided to install the Quad Mini in a completely different location to where I installed the Quad Pro. This means you probably can’t use my reviews to directly compare the antennas, but you probably shouldn’t be doing that anyway. In any case, the new location is a much better fit for the Quad Mini’s strengths.
Instead of in the middle of nowhere, I installed the Quad Mini on the first floor of a three-story house in the middle of a small town. (It’s actually a converted residence where the first floor is zoned for business and the upper two floors are a single residence, but that only matters to explain why the antenna is on the first floor.)
I’ve had T-Mobile Home Internet here for a while with the Arcadyan KVD21 gateway, but because of limited outlets and space, the gateway had to sit in a north-facing window while the nearest cell tower is southeast of the building. This window is also about 10 feet away from the east side of the building. There are windows facing east (which we’ll get to), but they’re mostly occupied with display items (east is also where the street is), so there isn’t really room for a big black box.
I had been considering mounting something like the Quad Pro outside, but since the space is rented and in the middle of downtown, it would be tricky running a cable around the side of the building and mounting a giant white panel without it looking kind of ridiculous. And that’s where the Quad Mini and its suction cup mounting option came in handy.
I swapped out the Arcadyan KVD21 for Chester Tech Repairs’ Cheetah V1, which has external antenna ports built in. I then put that gateway on a shelf next to one of the east-facing windows, stuck the antenna to that window, and hooked it up directly to the gateway. The long built-in cables were really handy here. In order to connect my network stuff to the gateway, I just ran a long Ethernet cable between it and the router.
I got lucky with having some street-facing windows that at least sort of face the cell tower, but that shouldn’t really matter too much with the Quad Mini. Waveform designed it to be an omni-directional antenna, meaning it doesn’t have to be facing directly towards the tower to get a good signal. As long as the Quad Mini has a path to the tower, mounting it in a window should help improve signal compared to internal antennas or a full-indoor setup.
Results
So how did the Quad Mini work? Did it improve my internet connection? Short answer: yes.
With the Arcadyan KVD21 in a very non-ideal window location, I could get up to 300Mbps download and 20Mbps upload on a good day, but the unloaded latency (as measured by my UniFi router) would frequently jump into the 50ms range or higher. Sometimes it’d hit 300-400ms.
Just moving the gateway probably would’ve helped with latency even without an external antenna, but like I mentioned earlier, there isn’t really any room for it in the east-facing windows. The suction cup mount for the Quad Mini let me mount it above and out of the way of all the display items, and the long cables let me put the gateway somewhere else.
Now, instead of 50ms or more of latency, it rarely goes above 30ms, a normal number for cellular internet. There are no more frequent spikes anymore, either.
As for speeds, the difference here was a little less dramatic than with the Quad Pro. The Quad Mini and Cheetah V1 gave me speeds of around 400Mbps down and 15-20Mbps up. Putting the Arcadyan KVD21 on the same shelf as the Cheetah gave me pretty wildly inconsistent speeds between 100Mbps and 400Mbps down.
Why was the speed difference here smaller? Probably a lot of reasons, the biggest one being my non-ideal antenna placement. The first floor of a building with other buildings all around really isn’t a great place for an antenna. I probably would’ve gotten much better speeds if I could have mounted it on the second or third floor. The Quad Mini is also just not as “powerful” as the Quad Pro and can’t pick up radio waves quite as well. That being said, the improvement in latency was well worth it.
Verdict
Even though the improvements weren’t super dramatic, I still think the Quad Mini was a worthy addition to my setup. It reduced my latency significantly and also gave me a bit of a speed boost. Plus, the suction cups are easy to remove, so if I want to try a different spot in the future, it’ll be really easy to do so.
I didn’t even need the complete kit the way I installed it, meaning this would’ve only set me back $120 plus tax. Of course, I did already have a gateway with external antenna ports, so I didn’t need the U.FL adapters that come in the complete kit. If you’re going to pair the Quad Mini with a stock carrier gateway, then you’ll need to spend another $40 for the 4 U.FL pigtail adapters.
The ease and flexibility of installation, combined with still-notable improvements even in a non-ideal scenario, make the Quad Mini an easy recommendation if you’re looking for a non-intrusive way to boost your cellular home internet signal. The much lower price compared to the Quad Pro also makes the Quad Mini an easier investment.
And the title isn’t an exaggeration. Our review unit went to another writer, but it works so well in my setup that I just ordered a complete kit for myself.
If you think the Quad Mini from Waveform is the right choice for your setup, you can check them out at the link below, and save 5% too.
