Mobile phone external aerial - to improve reception
Anyone else living in an area with poor reception? For me I get one signal bar with T-mobile - and that's on a good day! Other networks nil. I have been trying to set up an external aerial and I was wondering if anyone else had tried this. james
On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 11:24:19PM +0000, James Freer wrote:
Anyone else living in an area with poor reception? For me I get one signal bar with T-mobile - and that's on a good day! Other networks nil.
I have been trying to set up an external aerial and I was wondering if anyone else had tried this.
In principle it should work but in practice it's often very difficult to get an external aerial that actually works better than the phone's internal aerial. (or if you mean a router/computer with a 3G dongle the same applies) The problem is that the internal aerial is designed to be optimum for its size whereas with an external aerial there are nearly always compromises. In particular the connection from the aerial to the phone (or router) will lose some signal and the matching is likely to be less than perfect. I found that an external aerial used with a router to try and gain some extra signal from a marginal WiFi hotspot didn't help at all, the signal level stayed doggedly just about the same with the external aerial as with the internal one. OK, this was WiFi rather than phone signal but they're in the same neck of the woods frequency wise. On the other hand a dedicated 'High Power Wireless Access Point' which has an in-built directional aerial has transformed my WiFi connection from the same WiFi hotspot. -- Chris Green
On 15/03/14 23:24, James Freer wrote:
Anyone else living in an area with poor reception? For me I get one signal bar with T-mobile - and that's on a good day! Other networks nil.
Not sure if you meant to post this to ALUG but a lot of modern phones don't support external aerials now and the losses down anything other than very very expensive feed cable make the effective reception gains a lot less than transmission gains if the cable is anything more than a few meters long. Repeaters are expensive (even more so for one that is actually approved for use on your respective mobile operators network) Probably your best bet is to call the disconnections team and see if you can blag a free femtocell (EE now call it a "Signal Box") this is a local cell which uses your broadband for a backhaul to the mobile network. Not had experience of the EE one but voda pretty much give them away to customers that moan about home signal.
On 3/19/14, Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk> wrote:
On 15/03/14 23:24, James Freer wrote:
Anyone else living in an area with poor reception? For me I get one signal bar with T-mobile - and that's on a good day! Other networks nil.
Not sure if you meant to post this to ALUG but a lot of modern phones don't support external aerials now and the losses down anything other than very very expensive feed cable make the effective reception gains a lot less than transmission gains if the cable is anything more than a few meters long.
Repeaters are expensive (even more so for one that is actually approved for use on your respective mobile operators network)
Probably your best bet is to call the disconnections team and see if you can blag a free femtocell (EE now call it a "Signal Box") this is a local cell which uses your broadband for a backhaul to the mobile network. Not had experience of the EE one but voda pretty much give them away to customers that moan about home signal.
Thanks for your replies - I don't know much about these things and knew someone on here would know about such. ALUG is a 'mine of info'! What do you mean by disconnections team? I will phone EE and ask about femtocell/signal box. james
participants (3)
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Chris Green -
James Freer -
Wayne Stallwood