Tuesday, Aug 02, 2016 at 07:51
lyndon,
As per what Gronk says above, inductive cradles are basically useless. Even more so now that 4G is here.
That hand written note does indicate an improvement of about 2 - 3 dbm in the city. That is a seriously marginal improvement, You may pick up a signal 30 seconds quicker when driving. Simply moving your iphone 12" may do the same thing though. It also begs the question, what carrier and frequency were those measurements made on? There is a better than even chance that the frequency is different to that in the bush.
Another thing to note is the frequency bandwidth of the cradle and the
Antenna.
Taking Telstra as an example, they use 850Mhz and some 1800 in some cities for 3G, 2100mhz in some cities, 2600Mhz in other cities and areas, and now will focus on 700mhz outside the cities for 4G. A
phone call can even share all 4G frequencies now to get better coverage.
I doubt that your cradle /
antenna can work with all of those frequencies, in fact if the
antenna and cradle is not specified for all those, it will REDUCE the signal at times. Note some new antennas do claim to work across 700 to 2600 Mhz bands, this may be the case, but connected through an inductive coupler they are unlikely to perform
well across all frequencies, especially since a single frequency
antenna don't even work with an inductive coupler with any noticeable gain.
In the old days an 850Mhz Next G
antenna would work ( with an external
antenna socket on a
phone) but the days of having a single band external
antenna are long gone.
I would discourage anyone from trying to get better reception in a vehicle with inductive cradles and external antennas, the results are totally disappointing.AT BEST.
One last point is that no UHF
antenna will work reliably on a bullbar anyway. It should be in the roof of the vehicle if long range is the goal. Especially for the higher frequencies.
The odds are firmly stacked against any significant signal improvement I'm afraid.
AnswerID:
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