Spotwave's Cellular Signal Booster: C'mon, Peel The Noise*

A few years back, I decided to get a personal cellular account to supplement my work-provided mobile phone. My wife already had an account with a CDMA provider (Sprint; she just recently migrated to Verizon). So, to maximize our probability of getting a cellular dialtone no matter where we were, as well as to give me maximum-possible no-added-cost voice and data roaming capability, I went with a GSM provider, T-Mobile.

Overall, I’ve been quite pleased with my T-Mobile service; notably, since GSM is SIM card-based, I can easily migrate my account to newer phones as well as test GSM-based phones that companies send me for review in EDN. Quite pleased….albeit with one ‘gotcha’. GSM reception is lousy here at the home office. Punch my location into AT&T or T-Mobile’s coverage map sites and you’ll find that I’m in a coverage null in-between two cellular sites; a T-Mobile base station to the east and an AT&T tower to the west.

AT&T’s site claims that my reception should be ‘moderate’, while T-Mobile rates it as ‘2 bars’. Both evaluations are, in a word, charitable, and they’re only valid for outside usage. Within the house, coverage ranges from non-existent to ‘1 bar’, depending on time of day, what room I’m in, how I orient both the phone and myself, and how still I hold myself throughout the duration of a conversation or cellular data session. You can probably understand, then, why I was glad to stumble across Spotwave’s booth at January’s Consumer Electronics Show.

The company’s Z1900 Cell Phone Signal Booster, which I recently had the opportunity to test-drive (and which currently benefits from a $100 rebate offer), amplifies cellular signals only in the PCS (Personal Communications Service 1850-1990 MHz, aka ‘1900 MHz’) band. If you punch your zip code into the coverage calculator in the upper left corner of the company’s website home page (also found here), it’ll tell you which cellular providers and services the Z1900 supports. In my case, the list includes:

• Cingular Wireless (voice only, data services apparently use a different band)
• Metro PCS (voice and data)
• Sprint PCS (voice and data)
• T-Mobile (voice and data)

but doesn’t include either Nextel or Verizon. Before continuing, I’d recommend a visit to Spotwave’s Learning Center; specifically, I think you’ll find the document ‘The Adaptive Difference – Intelligent Technology‘ (PDF) to be of interest.

The company’s FAQ claims that "Spotwave’s Z1900 can take a relatively weak outdoor signal (eg 2 Bars or -100dBm) then boost it and retransmit it inside the home at a full 4-5 bars on your cell phone (-85 to -80dBm)." Elsewhere, that same document also states "If you can place a call outside your home or small office, the Z1900 cell phone signal booster unit will help you by boosting the signal inside the building. Usually this can be done with one or two bars displayed on your cell phone." The reviewer’s guide I received, however, was more definitive: "When considering your review location, I also wanted to note that you must have at least 2 bars of signal on the device outside the location in order to effectively enhance coverage indoors."

Given my earlier-described location’s reception attributes (or, perhaps more accurately stated, idiosyncrasies) I knew there’d be no guarantee that the Z1900 could help me here. Nonetheless, I plunged ahead, assisted by my friend Denis and his Danger/T-Mobile Sidekick 3, which reports more precise reception statistics. The table below details the initial signal strength we measured in various rooms of my home, both in dBm and in ASU (an acronym whose meaning I cannot discern in spite of vigorous Google searching).

Continue reading with ‘Spotwave’s Cellular Signal Booster: Two Days, Two Locations, Two Results, One Happy Ending‘….

*Little-known fact: Quiet Riot’s version of Cum on Feel the Noize wasn’t the original.