2GIG ANT5XL GC2: No Adaptor Needed for LTE Communicator

Hi, DIYers. This is Michael from Alarm Grid, and today I'm going to be showing you how you can set up the 2GIG ANT5XL GC2 antenna without an adapter. You can just plug it right into a 2GIG GC2 or a GC2E cellular communicator. You're not plugging it right into the panel itself, but you're plugging it into the communicator for the panel, but no adapter is needed. It's got this gold connector piece right here, and it just pops right in. And it's actually going to replace one of the two antennas that comes with the cellular communicator. And that's what you'll find with the 2GIG GC2E cellular communicator, it's going to come with a pair of antennas. Now this is going to replace the main antenna. There's actually two antenna ports, so there's one called DIV, and there's one called MAIN. So the antennas go to separate places. You're going to keep the DIV one, and you're actually going to keep that tucked inside the panel. And then you're going to take this one, connecting it to the main port, and you're going to have it going-- well, we're going to run it through our board here. And what you would normally do is you would have it installed or mounted high up, possibly in your attic, preferably facing the nearest cell tower, depending on the carrier, AT&T or Verizon, depending on what you have. But really, you just want to get it high up to get the best cellular signal possible. Because the reason you're using this is because you probably live in a rural area, or your business is in a remote rural area, it's far away from a cell tower. Really, cellular communication, it's really pretty good today. So if you're using an antenna, you're really-- you're pretty far out there, most likely. You don't have a strong cellular signal. Now your alarm monitoring company will be able to do a cellular test for you to let you know, hey, you don't have strong signals, you need a way to boost your signals. And you see, this is a pretty hefty antenna here. It's a pretty large one. You're going to see the antennas inside, they're actually considerably smaller. So this one, it's a pretty good size, so it works pretty well. But if you do need to increase your cell signal strength, then it works pretty well, and you can use it with any of the LTE communicators. So it's versatile. But we're going to show you how to install it into our 2GIG GC2E communicator today. We already have the communicator installed. That was a different video. But let's go ahead and do this. So first of all, we're going to open up the panel, so we're going to take off this front cover here, and we're going to set that aside. And you see we have our two locking mechanisms here, they are already undone, so we don't have to worry about that. But we just need to go in and pop this open here, let's get the first one, and then the second one, you see we have a panel tamper message there. We're going to just press OK, we're not really worried about that right now. So we're inside here. The first thing I'm going to do, I'm going to take the third hand here and I'm just going to have it like, so that way, my hands are free. And so we need to power down the system before we make any hardware changes. So let's undo the backup battery, and let's undo the AC power here. We have the end of an LT cable here, so we can conveniently just unplug it from the barrel connection. If you had it connected with the terminals here, then you probably want to just undo the transformer. Let's see if we have an example of the transformer here. Do we? Yeah, we do. Right here, this is what it look like, if I can get it over. This is what it would look like. Something along these lines. This one, I think that the specs on this one are different, but this is pretty much what you'd be looking for here. So let's go ahead and make sure everything's plugged in, because I'm pretty sure I unplugged the GC2 in the process there. So we're just going to plug this in real quick, just bear with me one second here. OK, so we got everything plugged back in. Just wanted to take care of that. But you see, it is powered down, because we undid it through the barrel connection. See, the system is powered down. Make sure you do that before making any hardware changes. Very important. So we have our antenna right here, so let's get it attached. So I'm going to undo the-- what is this called? The twisty cable thing. We're going to take that off. And so we have our connector piece right here, and we want ours to go into the main port. You see there's DIV, and then there's MAIN. We're going to take out the MAIN one here, and we're going to set that aside. Let's see if I can get it. Just trying to be sort of gentle with it. There we go, got it. And so let's take out this antenna that we had hiding in the back. See how much smaller this one is, compared with this one? So we're really getting a big cellular boost here. So this guy, we don't need anymore. Now we do have our DIV antenna, and that one's actually also heading in the back. Apparently, we had that in the wrong spot. We want to just tuck that somewhere inside the panel, really. Really, I could probably just leave it right there, that's fine. Because we're going to be taking this one, and we're going to be plugging this one into the main port, and we're going to be sending it through the back, and we're going to be moving it far away from the system, ideally mounted high up, as I described earlier. So you can see we, don't have an adapter here, we just can take it and we can just plug it right in. You see, you get a nice click, once I press it in. And 3, 2, 1. There we go. Nice click. So now we can take this, and we can just-- we would mount it high up, but for our purposes, we're just going to get it up and out of the way. So that way, it's away from the system. Like I said, you want to have the DIV antenna and the MAIN antenna in separate locations. They should not be in the same spot. And the MAIN antenna, which is this one, that one, you should ideally just have it mounted high up, towards a cell tower. And we're fine with our DIV antenna right there. So we can power our system back on now, so for a wireless system, we'll do our backup battery first. Just plug that in. And the system doesn't power on until we do our AC power, and we can just do the connection there. And we can verify that the system is coming on. I might need to check the transformer there, because I might have unplugged it earlier. So we're just going to tuck this guy in, and I will get the system back on before we go and conclude this video. But let's see if I can tuck the DIV antenna in there. I might need to wrap it around something here. You can stay right there, perhaps. And let's see if we can get this closed. There we go. And so we do need to find the transformer that I unplugged, so let's go search for that. So we're just going to go take a second here to find that. Let's see here. OK, there we go. So our system powered back on it. It had to get the AC power before it would power back on, so we have the battery and the AC power inserted, and we have the antenna installed and connected. And you saw we did it with no adapter, we just plugged it right back in. We have our DIV antenna hanging out inside the panel, and then we have our MAIN larger antenna that we just installed going back out behind our video board, where we would hopefully mount it up high somewhere towards a cell tower to get a better cell signal. So that is how you add a 2GIG ANT5XL GC2 antenna without an adapter. You don't need an adapter. So if you have any questions about the 2GIG ANT5XL GC2 antenna, or about the 2GIG GC2E, or alarm monitoring services, send an email to support@alarmgrid.com. If you found this video helpful, make sure to give it a thumbs up below to like the video, and remember to subscribe to our channel for updates on future videos. We hope you enjoy the video, thank you.