external antenna

Okay, now you have got me interested:

where does one find info on such <$100.00 "external-to-the-apartment"
antennas, including compatibility with phone models?

Franz


From: "Joel Kolstad" <JKolstad71HatesSpam@Yahoo.Com>
Subject: Re: no Sprint signal in new apartment, help!
Date: Friday, August 08, 2003 2:03 AM

John Navas <spamfilter0@navasgroup.com> wrote:
> The bigger issue is that there isn't a standardized way of measuring or
> reporting these numbers, so they wouldn't necessarily be comparable, and
> we'd probably get yet another hype horse race.

I'd say an 'almost' fair way to do it is to specify what incident power
level is needed to produce a given bit error rate, but I can see that
different systems perform better or worse with given BERs due to the amount
of forward error correction used, just the raw bandwidth of the vocoders,
etc... so perhaps you're right that no 'synthetic' benchmark like this would
be that useful. As in computer benchmarking, I suppose that the 'real
world' measurement would almost have to be something along the lines of
measuring dropout percentages or total harmonic distortion _at the ear
pieces_ as a function of incident power... although there too, some vocoders
are better than others at error correcting their inputs... (Measuring THD
also has the advantage that it gives you the upper bound on how good the
voice call will ever be even with a strong signal -- this is something you
see people asking about on the newsgroup as well.)

> But I think the bigger
> issue is that the general public isn't terribly interested in RF
> performance as compared to things like styling, features, size, weight,
> coolness, etc.

People who purchase a cell phone and then find they're in fringe reception
areas would care about such specs. at least the _second_ time they purchased
a phone!

> When I wrote "external" I meant external to the phone, not external to the
> apartment. The former is relatively cheap and easy, but of limited value.
> The latter is a lot more cost and hassle.

Well, the 'external to the apartment' antenna is <$100 and somewhere between
15 minutes and a few hours depending on how 'nicely' you'd want to mount it.
True, not exactly 'cheap,' but considerably better than the $500 repeaters
proposed -- for the extra $400 I'd be OK dealing with the hassle of plugging
the antenna cable in and out for.

---Joel Kolstad