No, I'm not talking about the gadgets that stick on glass car windows...
My home office is in an attic and is insulated with foil-coated insulation. My cell phone doesn't work there, even though it works downstairs in the same house.
It would be presumably be easy to build a passive repeater connecting the interior with the outside world (or the uninsulated part of the attic).
Has anyone done this? Any experience or recommendations?
(By passive repeater I mean 2 antennas joined by a cable, one antenna inside and the other outside the shielded area.)
Get hold of two car phone aerials, one on the outside, pass a bit of coax through to the other mounted on the inside of your attic - did the same years back - not fantastic but a definate improvement.
Really? Then there a lot of people making imaginary phone calls. Typically the outside antenna is a yagi cut to the right band to get some gain. Some systems use a pair of yagis.
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Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
It's done routinely. The main limitation is that you tend to end up with noticeably less signal strength than you think you "should." Compared to the power received by your phone if you were out standing on the roof, due to interconnect losses and being still somewhat within the effects of the repeating antenna's near field, you often end up with significant losses, e.g., 20dB worse. Still, if you're in a strong signal area to begin with and have enough power margin, it'll work fine. Using a directional antenna (if you know where the nearest cell tower is) can make up for some of the loss. This waffling really amounts to saying, "Well... it'll probably work, but one can't really say for certain until you've tried it (without test equipment to measure signal strengths)." Worst case -- you'll try it, it doesn't work, and you'll just end up running the cable down from the receive antenna to plug into the back of your phone.
The guys over on rec.radio.amateur.antenna could likely point you to specific web sites that will design directional antennas for you, such as the Yagis that Michael mentioned.
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