Is there a way to boost the reception of your phone?
If I put my phone in a metal case with long antennas on it would that work?
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Yes, you can. There are remote locations in Australia where they use “satellite dish” like constructions to make a phone hotspot: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-12/mobile-hot-spots-in-remote-nt/6688924
The principle is the same as a normal satellite dish: it concentrates the weak radio waves onto a single spot, in this case your phone.
Just sticking random antennas on something doesn’t work though – antennas need very precise dimensions and alignments to work *at all*.
I don’t think it suits this subreddit, but whatever..
You would need to open your phone. Antena is connected with circular connector… You could plug external antenna to it.
I did it with my old blackberry back in 2006~… I don’t know why it shouldn’t work nowdays
Cell phones require two way communication to work. Even if you think you’re just receiving data you’re actually transmitting acknowledgements that you successfully received each packet of data. So the first thing you have to do is determine if your “reception” problem is actually a reception problem or a transmission problem.
Better antennas are a good way to boost both. I should note here that antennas don’t actually boost power, either received or transmitted. They have no external power source so they can’t actually amplify total power. What they do is redirect it…they trade power in one direction for power in another direction. Putting a “better” antenna on a device can be done but if the interface isn’t perfectly matched you lose all the benefits by introducing new power losses (to heat and/or signal reflections) at the unmatched interface. With cell phones the manufactured antenna and interface are already matched. Adding a different one would be unlikely to work well.
Yes you can!
In older generation of phones, they would often have small ports that you could attach an external antenna to (such as [https://www.criterioncellular.com/antenna-adapters/index.html](https://www.criterioncellular.com/antenna-adapters/index.html)) for use in a vehicle or on the road when cellular service was in its infancy.
Now we can use the charging port (Lightning or USB) to connect to an external antenna (See [https://thfcomms.com.au/product/iphone-13-car-kit-cradle-with-7-db-high-gain-antenna-iphone-13-car-signal-booster/](https://thfcomms.com.au/product/iphone-13-car-kit-cradle-with-7-db-high-gain-antenna-iphone-13-car-signal-booster/))
An alternative solution is getting a “signal booster” – think of these as WiFi routers for your cellphone. They take an existing weak signal coming in and amplify it, rebroadcasting it to your local area. Great if you have a few dead spots, but important to know – your signal may show full bars on your phone, but you are still limited by the signal of the booster in terms of speed and quality.
Just “attaching an antenna to a case” won’t help, unless that antenna is connected to you phone’s antenna somehow. Modern phones are not designed around using an external connector for that any longer.
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