Universal mobile phone antenna

Just wondering about a couple of things. Do you notice your phones' battery usage increasing at all when they're connected to the antenna? And are these things easy enough to instal in your car? Do you use them with a car kit handsfree or just the phone?

thanks heaps.

matt

Don't notice any difference on phone battery usage as they are placed in a hard wired car kit, this way the phone is running off the car battery while in use and is being kept charged at the same time. This is virtually the only legal way to use a mobile phone in the car as you can legally not touch the phone at all while driving, I hate pulling over and sometimes you cant pull over straight away to answer the phone. At least using it this way, our phones are all voice activated to do everything. Did try using a patch lead and antenna on an old Kyocera 3245 with just a handsfree only without any luck on our signal strength. Your question on the car kit is, yes they are very easily installed. just foll the diagram that comes with them.

I was under the impression that it wasn't dual band and that there were two different aerials available, 1 of GSM and the other for CDMA. It says in the product description "CDMA or GSM available" and then in the Q&As "Q: Are the antennas different for GSM and CDMA Regards Alex. A: Yes, they operate at different frequencies." I thought that meant that there are two different products which operate at different frequencies.

But I don't know much about phone aerials so I could be off the mark, just thought it seemed pretty cheap for a 7dBi antenna. Most of the ones you see around are 6dBi. And since nokia don't have a compatible aerial for my 3205, I was interested.

A question for you Pluto, and Toy_Hilux, since you guys seem to know more than me about this stuff, is the FME plug standard for phone aerials? Like, is that the plug that most aerials have? I'm just thinking if I grab one of the External Antenna Adaptor Cables (link in above post) will it plug into any aerial? Then I can shop around for a good aerial. My problem at the moment is, as I said, Nokia dont make an aerial that fits my 3205, so if the FME connector is standard, an adaptor cable will solve the problem.

thanks

matt

Matt,

You could be right about the differing products. My look over the ebay posting was pretty quick.

If you have a Nokia CDMA phone, the external antenna won't make much difference to reception because they don't use a direct electrical connection to the external antenna. Much signal loss in transmission and reception.

The FME plug seems to be the most common coax termination standard for mobile phones, although other plugs are used.