AIO Antenna upgrades?

[trinity]

I don’t like to cross-post but this seemed particularly relevant to both threads.

@trinity

Though common knowledge here is that dtparam=ant1 refers to the Compute Module antenna and dtparam=ant2 refers to the mainboard antenna, on my CM5 system I am certain the opposite is true.

The aluminum uConsole chassis, as documented elsewhere, acts as a pretty good though not perfect faraday cage. I have a proper WiFi antenna connected to the mainboard mounted on the side of the mid-chassis. I ran iwctl and invoked station wlan0 show to live-display my WiFi signal strength without my back cover screwed in. On ant2, the strength was fairly weak, and once the back cover was screwed on I had a -90dBm strength standing 1-2m from my WiFi router. Now that I am using ant1, I have a -55dBm signal from my room.

(correction:

@trinity

ant1: The built-in PCB triangle antenna (this is the default)
ant2: The external U.FL connector

but I still don’t know why dtparam=ant1 works for me)