I get a rubbish signal in my car, with a Blackberry on Orange.
Ebay 110613345362 is a two-piece 'booster'. A 15cm aerial allegedly captures the signal in the cabin, and transmits it through the glass to a
35cm antenna where it flies off through the magical ether.Total snake oil, or is there a reasonable chance of some improvement?
Thanks - Steve
Do you really have to ask?
Peter Crosland
Where in the car do you have your phone? Is the windscreen one of these metallised heat reflecting jobs? both have major influence on reception.
I am also on Orange, with my iPhone in its cradle on the dash it works fine, but when used almost anywhere else in the car reception is very poor. The cradle has a hard wired aerial stuck to the windscreen on the black speckled bit along the edge of the glass.
Mike
Is it snake oil? When I had a full Nokia car kit the external aerial was glue mounted on the glass of the rear screen and passed the signal to a receiver that was glued on the inside and which was then cable connected to the unit under the dashboard. It definitely worked because on a couple of occasions when I forgot to screw the antenna back onto its base after going through a carwash the phone got a much lower signal. In these days of Bluetooth I have removed it all and there is no hole in the glass.
...not that there ever was hole in the glass
Hi Mike - It's not mounted anywhere in particular, connects by bluetooth to a parrot kit. I put it on the dash or in a roof pocket near the rear-view mirror when the signal is weak. The screen isn't metallised.
Yeah, for years I clung onto a hardwired 6310i with Nokia holster and proper external antennae (praise be to Peter Parry, God of decent phone stuff). But I had to let go in the end, and moved to Blackberry instead. The Blackberry (8320) doesn't seem to be constructed for holstering connnectivity, and I've never found a Curve cradle with an aerial built into it (if anyone knows a supplier, please url me!).
Cheers
Yeah, I think I do. The 'transmission through glass' was a widely-used technology in early car kits, seen on millions of rep-mobiles even now. It doesn't seem inherently impossible to my uneducated eyes, so I'm asking the 'spurts.
That was pretty much the default installation for millions of carphones, before bluetooth.
But in this case, the pictures show the external antenna glued to the rear window and the internal antenna on the dashboard. I don't see how that could do anything useful. Also, it seems unlikely that the devices shown could behave the same way over the frequency range 850 to 2500MHz.
Passive repeaters can sometimes work very well, but those that do are usually fairly narrowband and use low-loss coaxial cable between the two antennae. The ones which used to be used for carphones had a special coupling device which transmitted the external signal through the glass into an internal coupler, on the inside of the glass at the same location and on to a coax which led to the phone.
John
Would this help?
Ooh crikey, you're right. I hadn't paid any attention to the dash photo, I just assumed that the two antennae would be glued directly opposite each other on the glass. Meh, it's obviously bollocks now that you've pointed that out. Thanks!
Agreed.
In article , Tinkerer scribeth thus
The Glass in modern cars is inherently lossy at those frequencies. We have known a fleet of Taxis where they had severe problems getting a decent "Fix" for their tracking system with the aerials in the car's!.
The thru glass aerial is quite a lossy device as well, and most of the cables that are fitted don't help that much with the thin size they have to be. The gubbins referred to by the original poster is in the junk category.
The installation referred to above is the way it used to be done with a fixed mobile unit which were much better, and still are if you can get them for the phone you use!...
When you find one that,
Works
Doesn't offend any Ofcom regulations,
Is type approved,
Doesn't cost an arm and two legs,
..then let me know as I'd like one;)...
I use a couple for relaying DECT and WiFi signals between my office/ lab and the under-stairs cupboard in the house where the base units live. The coax is about 15m long but is VERY thick - about 10mm diameter semi air-spaced. The antenna at each end is a home-made well- matched sleeve dipole. They work and don't cost much. No type approval has been done, but I would be surprised if they break any regulations.
John
If its entirely passive then Nope, I don't expect it would 'tho how efficient is it?...
And is that practical for mobile car use?..
A bit difficult to install and unlikely to make a worthwhile difference in a car. There are couplers built into cradles which might be of some use if they are connected to a good external antenna with a low-loss cable but I haven't seen one lately.
I was just making the point that in some rare situations passive repeaters can genuinely be useful but it takes a lot of effort to get the losses low enough.
John
Yes a company called Axel wireless make them for applications such as tunnels etc. Provided you can separate the receive and transmit aerials so it doesn't feed back you get some useful gain ...
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