You’ve seen the ads on TV for the little stick-on antenna boosters that look like a printed circuit board and claim to boost the range of your cell phone. Do these things really work? What is the science involved?
I recently changed jobs, and my office is apparently in a “fringe” service area for my provider. Sometimes I can make and receive calls just fine, but other times my calls break up or disconnect unexpectedly.
If I can spend a couple of bucks and get better service it would be a good deal, but I don’t want to throw my money away on snake oil. Does anyone know of studies that have been done on these things?
Think of is this way. If there was a $5 option of making cell phones work much better without having to upgrade towers costing several million dollars, Nokia (and others) would already be on this sort of thing.
There are “antenna boosters” out there. They’re called external antenna kits. The only catch is that any antenna boosting over 0.5 watts (the current limit) requires non-direct contact to you. I’ve seen boosters that fit onto backpacks and, of course, car tops (3 watts next to your head is probably not a good thing to do).
It probably would be possible to construct a yagi-type device that could be attached to an existing cell phone to boost the reception, BUT… it would have to fairly precisely engineered and the placement of the device in relation to the antenna would be crucial; also, it would be directional. None of this is going to be achieved by a little sticker with a foil spiral on it.