Slashdot Mirror
Using a Cellphone in a Basement?
Nimsoft asks: "I recently moved into a basement flat and as a result I get no cellphone coverage in there. This is incredibly frustrating as my cell provider is so much cheaper than landline offerings I rely on my cell as my primary means of telecommunications. I can pick up a signal the second I step out of my front door and friends on other networks can sometimes pick up a weak signal within my flat. What would the geek solution (must be cheap!) to this issue be? Would attaching a larger antenna to my phone work, or can I hack together some sort of repeater and put an antenna outside somewhere?" While thousands of offers of repeaters and signal boosters are only as far away as the nearest Google search, what recommendations or experiences would you care to share on the subject?
To counter problems like these, operators are coming up with WLAN-GSM / WLAN-CDMA solutions. A cellphone can switch seamlessly to WLAN network when you enter your home and there is WLAN signal. The voice traffic is encoded and transmitted to the operator's network. I believe, T-Mobile and Sprint have plans for such products.
Well Bluetooth is good for 10 metres, or 32 feet which is twice the size of my front room. He wasn't very clear but it might be that he can get a signal if the phone is actually on the windowsill, this has worked for me. Bluetooth should work fine, his problem is he can't get a signal from *outside* to his phone, but a signal from phone to headset within the same area should be ok. Also, cell phone frequencies are much different to bluetooth so the same conditions don't apply. While I'm posting, I was thinking he doesn't actually need a headset, he could use a USB bluetooth dongle on his PC and use the mic and speakers.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
First, as everyone else has suggested, run a bunch of antenna feedline down to the phone, from an antenna parked in a good location. This sucks, because there's a tradeoff between flexibility and performance. Also, the antenna connector on your handset may or may not be very durable. However, if you're going to go this route, check a truck stop for adapters. Truckers generally spend a lot of time outside traditional cellphone coverage, and any well-equipped service plaza that's more than a hundred miles from a big city will probably carry an assortment of antenna adapters. They generally use TNC as the "common" antenna connector, since it was the standard on the old analog bag phones.
:)
Second, you could leave the phone upstairs where it gets decent signal already, and bring the voice downstairs. Do this with a Cellsocket or a Dock'n'talk cellular POTS adapter. Run a regular phone line down to where you spend most of your time, or hook up a cordless phone to the analog port.
Next option: Leave the phone upstairs. Get a really long headset cord, if your phone supports voice dialing and an answer/hangup button on the headset.
Yet another dumb idea: Leave the phone upstairs, and use a Bluetooth headset to bring the audio down. You should be able to dial by sending commands from a Bluetooth-equipped PDA.