On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 11:24:19PM +0000, James Freer wrote:
Anyone else living in an area with poor reception? For me I get one signal bar with T-mobile - and that's on a good day! Other networks nil.
I have been trying to set up an external aerial and I was wondering if anyone else had tried this.
In principle it should work but in practice it's often very difficult to get an external aerial that actually works better than the phone's internal aerial. (or if you mean a router/computer with a 3G dongle the same applies)
The problem is that the internal aerial is designed to be optimum for its size whereas with an external aerial there are nearly always compromises. In particular the connection from the aerial to the phone (or router) will lose some signal and the matching is likely to be less than perfect.
I found that an external aerial used with a router to try and gain some extra signal from a marginal WiFi hotspot didn't help at all, the signal level stayed doggedly just about the same with the external aerial as with the internal one. OK, this was WiFi rather than phone signal but they're in the same neck of the woods frequency wise.
On the other hand a dedicated 'High Power Wireless Access Point' which has an in-built directional aerial has transformed my WiFi connection from the same WiFi hotspot.