Antenna Boosters for Cell Phones?

Hollinger asks: "Earlier this summer, I bought a brand-new Samsung 8500 PCS phone. It looks great, sounds great (more on that in a sec) and is very small. However, I have one problem. I thought that my new apartment was in the middle of a PCS deadzone. However, friends with other model phones (less expensive, mind you) can get a good, clear signal. This leads me to wander about the signal strength of my own phone. I've been shopping around to see if anyone has reviewed any of the 'Internal Antenna Boosters' that I've seen ads for, but I can't find any. Has anyone on Slashdot tried one of these? Do they work, and if so, how well?"

Comments

Internal Antenna?

[shumacher]

You're not talking about the internal antenna, are you? One of my co-workers bought it. He saw no improvement. At the very least, I'd expect that there would be a few models so the antenna could be tuned for the frequency used by the phone. To my knowledge, there is no such product. If you want more detail, call Miss. Cleo.

Snake Oil

[Chelloveck]

To quote a friend at Motorola, "If a cheap add-in would help your signal, don't you think we'd ship phones with it installed?"

But if you buy one, you might also be interested in this product for your TV.

The general EE consensus was 'snake oil'

[stienman]

In a recent discussion on an EE mailing list, the radio heads argued that since these boosters are often placed between the handset and the battery pack, then no benefit could be derived since the metal pack shielded them, effectively creating a small faraday cage.

Others noted that perhaps they could couple some RF from the inside of the unit to the edges or the antenna (which tends to be located close to the battery pack), but that that would only serve to increase the distortion of the radio transmission, even if it did increase the transmission power. Of course, if they did increase the power, then they are certianly not legal to use since nearly every phone you can buy is already at the FCC and FDA limit.

But if you want to /really/ increase your transmission inside your house then I've got some special oxygenized air I can sell you, since RF travels through oxygenized air far better than through lead. It's only $5 per can, and if you want to get in on the business, I can sell you a special oxygenator so you can make your own and make a bundle!

-Adam

Repeaters, repeaters..

[terpia]

I have the same problem with my cell phone; inside the house I get 0-2 bars of signal strength and outside I get 1-3....not a significant difference unless you use my phone (which I do, of course), and then its a BIG difference. Ive been toying with the idea of placing a passive repeater on every window in the house and seeing what happens... I did a search on Ebay for repeaters ("cellular repeater" returned 0 results...) and found a bunch of passive repeaters as well as lots of repeaters that look more complex and list a bunch of specs that I dont understand... anyways heres the URL http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPIC ommand=GetResult&pb=&ht=1&st=2&query=repeater&Sort Property=MetaEndSort

and heres the url for somrthing that looks useful, but I dont know how....http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ewItem&item=1289651845