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Cell Phone Reception Hack
New Breeze writes "Has this ever happened to you? Just when you need to make a phone call, the bars of reception are scant to none. But Graeme, who writes a blog called 'Earth: Mostly Harmless,' gives us hope. Succeeding where most would quit, he chronicled his ingenuity in a post titled 'How I got mobile phone reception where there was no signal.'" Update: 08/01 14:31 GMT by T : Note: Credit for this story belongs to Mike Yamamoto, who wrote it for CNET's News.com.
Use an external antenna. A lot of phones still have connectors for those, so no hacks required there.
How I read a webpage from a server that had been slashdotted into oblivion.
Is the linked site down for anyone else? Already?
I can't wait for: "How I got pages served when my server was Slashdotted."
Yeah, that's positively ancient. But it works. Without frying your brain cells... :-)
I can't believe the site's down already. This means that Slaashdotters are actually reading TFA. Who knew?
Standing on top of the roof works fine for me. Except I wouldn't do that during a thunderstorm. Lightning strikes, you know.
It's getting pretty slow. Here's a mirror.
Plus, there's no cache in Google. Somewhere, in dim rack room, a server cries out in pain.
...what do we do when your mirror is slashdotted? :p
Nice solution I guess if you want a ghetto antenna next to your window, but it reminds me of my friends little brother. He was unhappy with his remote control cars range so he took a backpack and mounted a huge CB whip antenna to it and wired the antenna of the remote to the backpack. Dipole be damned, he claimed it made the car's range better. Of course he looked like a complete tard running around the street, but that wasnt unusual for him.
All he does is use an external antenna, maybe if it fiddled with some of the phones internal settings I might call it a hack.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
How I got mobile phone reception where there was no signal
Posted at 20:30 by Graeme
Categories: Uncategorized
(Or, to be more accurate, where 20ft of solid stone was blocking line-of-sight to the nearest transmitter.)
I just got a Nokia E61 on T-Mobile. When I signed up, I knew that the signal was really weak in the back of our house - the building forms a large square, and my bedroom faces into the centre of the square. I could get a signal in the living room (just), but wouldn't it be great, I thought, not to have to go through there every time the phone rings. Although outside my house full-strength UMTS signals are readily available, the building's construction prevents them diffracting into the internal 'courtyard'.
All I needed was enough reception to receive and send SMS messages. I have home WiFi for data access, and I can potentially make calls over that too. I planned to aim for UMTS reception rather than GSM since: a) I didn't know which GSM frequency to aim for and b) E series Nokia phones maintain their batteries better if they have UMTS signals (otherwise they constantly search for a UMTS signal).
I tried two car-type external antennas that I got via eBay - but unfortunately the gain on both of these was just too low (barely even compensating for the losses in the cable running to the phone). Also, neither were sufficiently directional to catch enough of the reflected signal to give me anything to work with.
The first step was the figure out what the extent of the problem was. I located my nearest T-Mobile base station using the government's Sitefinder service. This also confirmed the frequency that the transmitter used - 2100Mhz. This is the standard frequency for UMTS (i.e. 3G) services in Europe.
By drawing a line between the transmitter's location and my building in Google Earth, I was able to confirm the approximate distance and angle of the signal I needed to catch.
Buying a directional antenna wasn't really an option - for a start, they are expensive - and anyway I couldn't be sure that such an antenna would actually help. If it didn't, I'd have wasted £60-£100.
However, in an incredibly geeky flash of inspiration, I realised that there really isn't much difference in operating frequency between WiFi (around 2.4Ghz) and UMTS (2.1Ghz). And there are loads of different clandestine WiFi antenna ideas floating around the Internet. If I could find an easy-to-build directional WiFi antenna, perhaps I could reverse-engineer its dimensions and adapt it for 2100Mhz use.
So I set about the task. I decided on the biquad antenna type, as it's fairly compact and easy to build, yet provides decent (10-14dB) gain and is quite directional. My primary sources of information were the many WiFi biquad and double bi-quad antenna tutorials and blog entries, such as: Engadget's; Trevor Marshall's tutorials. More can be found on my del.icio.us page for the tag 'antenna'.
Both WiFi and UMTS operate in microwave frequencies - however, there's a substantial difference between the middle WiFi channel (around 2.4Ghz - what people usually tune their WiFi antennas to in order to give a good amplification factor across the channel range) and UMTS' 2.1Ghz. To my knowledge no-one has built a homebrew biquad UMTS antenna before, so there wasn't much to go on. What also didn't help was that most WiFi biquad tutorials just give you the measurements verbatim - not the calculations of formulae.
Having done no physics since school, my expertise in antenna building is poor to say the least. Still I did realise a few things about most of the designs floating around the Web: all of the dimensions were multiples of the wavelength at 2.44Ghz (122mm or 0.122m). So then, I just needed to figure out the multiplication factors in each case and I was sorted.
My list is as follows: ( = wavelength)
* Emitter wire total length: 2
* Emitter 'square' side length: 0.25
GSM phones here operate on 850/1900Mhz. 3G is not really deployed yet.
Mmmm, bars.
Sorry, got distracted there. I'd like to know why it is that there are 4 bars right before I dial, and only 2 bars (or worse) right after I hit the SEND button. This has happened to me multiple times. I'm pretty sure it's even happened to me on 2 different carriers.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
http://www.sitefinder.radio.gov.uk/
Error 2101: all your sig are belong to us
Not to rain on this guy's parade, but well duh! If you put up a bi-quad antenna, a circular polarized quad bay or 8 element yagi you would get a better signal. Of course he could have used a pringle can for a 12db gain.
Fight Spammers!
So, I get to /. and I start to scan the articles. The usual stuff...12 dupes and a few new stories. I get to one called Cell Phone Reception Hack
Cool. I'll check that one out.
I pull up the list of comments and I click on the link to the article. I read the article from start to finish and having consumed the literary words on the page, let me be the first to post...
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
Read my lips: Antenna != hack
This is in no way, shape, or form a hack. It is a guy building an antenna. It's only been done by thousands of other ppl over the last 50 years. But yea, let's run the story anyway and call it a 'hack'.
Well, it's not.
Do you know where to buy ancient phones and accompanying service? I'd be amused to have a bag phone or an OKI (they're really cool old hackable analog phones--remote controllable with DTMF, reprogrammable to display a list of other calls on the cell and let you select one to listen to, computer controllable, etc...), but I don't know where to buy them, and I don't know how to get service for them. (The cheapest plans most companies have now are around $40-$50.) Thanks for any pointers you can give.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
I have this happen to me too. I suspect it has to do with the angle that the cellphone is at. When it's lying on the table, the antenna aims out the windows usually. Whereas once I pick it up to dial, the signal has to go through much more building material. I think I can see a pattern when I change the angle of the phone, but it's hardly scientific. It could be that I have a metal plate in my head that I didn't know about. :)
FWIW, my cell signal at home is marginal. It's pretty good on the south side, towards what I think is the transmitter's location, and very iffy everywhere else.
Linky
How cant this be a hack, He plugged an antenna into his phone and got better reception.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The irony, of course, is that a person who spends his spare time 'hacking' his cell phone probably has no real use for it outside of work -- and do you really want work calling when you're in your bedroom?
I saw a commercial version of this "hack" that you plug into the wall. I think it was just a repeater. Can anyone confirm this?
High quality cable? RG-58?? He is kidding right? I know it is 'Radio-Grade' and balanced at 75ohm...but it is definitely not high quality. RG-6 is the bare minimum I would use for this...and that is if I was hacking it to pieces. Seriously...he could have spent $10 (or pounds or whatever) on a decent length of cable.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
I managed to hack my electricity so it reached areas it never did before. I used this hacking device called an "extension cord".
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
The article's writer says things like "this antenna has a good gain, and is quite directional".
However, the gain is the efficiency times the directivity, so a high gain implies a very directional antenna; and, the only parameter that matters (AFAIK) is the gain, because the gain alone is enough to specify how much power you get from a given electromagnetic wave (not counting the losses in the cable and the impedance mismatch, but these are not affected by the directionality of the antenna anyway).
PS: Forgive my bad English, I'm not American.
When I've been in the sticks and had to use my phone, I always seem to find a useable analog signal. I may have to stand on the roof of my car, lift my left leg, and hold head at a certain angle but it will eventually work. Odd thing on that though. I've never had an analog signal greater then 1 bar. My question, where the hell are these analog transmitters that I always have a usable signal but never a good one. Freaky.
A trick I've used to get better range from my car alarm transmitters, hold the transmitter against your cheek and raise your other arm. You will get at least 25% more distance, really.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Just a note to try to prevent this comment being lost.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
RG-58 is high quality cable when compared to RG-174 - but a better choice in that size would be RG-223. RG-6 is 75 ohm, and coaxial cables are usually referred to as unbalanced lines as the outer conductor is usually at ground potential.
If the only need was SMS and you're in front of a computer, I can't help but think it would be much easier to just use SMS over IP. I know that bluebottle provides this (for a fee), and I'm sure there are others as well. I think I recall ATT having a free SMS over IP service for messaging their customers - I can't recall if it could receive though. Anyone know of any free two-way SMS services online?
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So, not being as inclined to go build my own antenna, can anyone recommend a ready-made device that I can install in my car and home that will increase my gain? I've seen such things advertised but have no idea which are gimmicks and which are real.
What I imagine is some antenna that I can plug into an outlet which will then boost the signal for my cell phone within an immediate radius. I'd like one for my car (which has AC power) and home.
I'm using Cingular and whatever frequency they have. I'd be great if it worked with voice as well as SMS and data.
Anybody got some tips for me?
-David
"Has this ever happened to you? Just when you need to make a phone call, the bars of reception are scant to none. But Graeme, who writes a blog called 'Earth: Mostly Harmless,' gives us hope. Succeeding where most would quit, he chronicled his ingenuity in a post titled 'How I got mobile phone reception where there was no signal.'"
Such a bad intro. He basically made a mobile phone into a not so mobile phone connected to a highly directional antena. That will not work for me or anyone else while I'm driving, walking down the streat or in a train. Which, is basically the only time it happens to most people. While I appreciate his predictimant and commend him on "solving" it. It really won't help many people, and wasn't that novel of a solution. It reminds me of undergrad research. Do something everyone has done before, but in a trivially different way and claim its ground breaking.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
... Adrian individual? (2nd or 3rd poster on the blog) [stewie]He needs to get laid BIG TIME![/stewie] This dude is a nerve wreck! Geez!
Got MILF? It does a body good!
This is how I got rid of spam in my blogs comments:
I got my blog slashdotted, and now I have so many comments on my blog that I'll be busy moderating until next April 1st. And almost no spam among them!
Debian GNU/Linux - apt-get into it.
Hey buddy,
You don't need a fancy antenna. Just type in your SMS, press "send" and immediately throw the phone straight up as high as you can.
It'll get through.
-Thetan.
ps Make sure you catch it again!
I wanted to find a prepay plan with free incoming and run a BBS off that sucker, with a 300 baud modem on a C64, in the back of my car just for kicks
:)
You must be a devil with the ladies..
Unfortunately, it's just a "How to _use an antenna_" article.
/.), but it's a lot less than you would think given how much each group could stand to gain and benefit and learn from the other. There's some stuff being done that honestly is breathless and new, on the cutting edge of both radio communications technology and information/computer technology, but there's a shortage of people with the combined background to contribute. How much further along would we be, if both groups were't wasting so much time reinventing each others' wheels?
Yeah, pretty much.
I don't want to be too hard on the guy, because it sounds like this was his first antenna project, but the whole article just makes me a little sad. What he did isn't even all that hard, and if he had done a little more searching around he would have found literally thousands of pages and hundreds of articles, complete with formulae and schematics, on how to build antennas of this type.
There's an amateur radio band located just above (and IIRC overlapping slightly with) the 2.4GHz ISM band. There's tons of antenna construction resources; the American Radio Relay League has two volumes written about the topic. (Although it covers a lot more than just antennas, admittedly.) Although I don't own the book, I'd bet that most of those articles probably have equations for scaling the dimensions to particular frequencies, so it would be trivial to do what he was attempting. (And a quite likely a violation of FCC rules, but that's another story.)
On a more general note, it's a little sad to see how little of a connection there is between the radio "hacking" community and the computer one. Perhaps it's due to there being a generational gap in there, but I've never met two groups of people that have as much in common, philosophically, as computer hackers and ham radio tinkerers. When I read articles like TFA, where the author says "To my knowledge no-one has built a homebrew biquad UMTS antenna before..." it just really underscores how poor a job the amateur radio community has done in connecting with computer geeks. The topic at hand here isn't something breathless and new, it's well-understood to the point of probably being boring. But because of the lack of connection between the two interest groups (even though, as in this case, they have a lot of common interests even if they don't realize it), we have computer geeks painfully reinventing the basics of antenna design, and we have ham radio operators who haven't in some cases even figured the Web out completely, much less how to use it to collaborate.
That's not to say that there aren't computer geeks who are into ham radio and vice versa -- the number of radio-related software projects is testament to that (as am I, and others here on
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...but then I saw TFA wasn't posted by the RolandMonkeydroid and therefore you might be telling the truth.
All one has to do is change the length of the tubing in-between the spacers to accommodate the wavelength. Then, just aim it toward the tower. Bam. It'll set you back about ten dollars.
it's not all about the signal strength: that's only part of it. For GSM, each cell tower can only make a limited (and surprisingly small) number of simultaneous voice and data calls. This means you can have perfect reception, but not be able to make a call. In cases where the contention ratio's been reached and you're already on a call, you may find your call dropped if someone else tries to make a new call to the emergency services - all part of the GSM specs.
Well... a long time ago, when I first got my hands on a Sinclair 1000 personal computer with 2K of RAM and started learning about computers and programming, I also got the "itch" to learn more about HAM radio. I can defiinitely see where the potential "crossover" is with the two interests/hobbies.
The reason *I* didn't pursue HAM radio and did pursue computers, BBSing, and later the Internet, is because I didn't need a government-issued license to use my computer!
To this day, it still keeps me away from doing anything with amateur radio. I feel like HAMs, in general, like preserving sort of an "elite" status through FCC licensing. There's something that, to me, just feels ridiculous about having to announce a long callsign with each radio communication, and having to take and pass exams before I can transmit on a radio that I paid hundreds of dollars for already.
Does it keep the overall "quality" of users higher than they'd be without it? Yes... no doubt. But I *still* like the Internet better without it imposing similar restrictions on its usage - despite the spammers and garbage web site content!
The antenna on my old phone broke off. I'd often have to touch a metal object, like my keys, to antenna's stub to get a signal.
About 2 years ago West Marine started selling a wireless version of a cell repeater meant for RV's and boats, now available through West Marine for about $500. No connection to the phone required, no license required either.
WM Model #:5903380
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!