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March 06, 2006
Not Fooling Around
One of the problems that we constantly run into profiling phones is poor coverage. Where we are located, we get good CDMA coverage, and T-Mobile is good, but Cingular is very bad. We tackled the problem last summer by purchasing a PCS signal amplifier. I posted about it at the time. The one we bought last summer is small and gives us pretty good gain for CDMA and GSM (Cingular is still pretty bad though), but doesn't handle iDEN. Well this has been a problem for us this month because we have started in on the task of profiling Nextel phones and we get absolutely no coverage inside our office.
So this time when I bought a BDA (bi-Directional Amplifier) for iDEN networks, I made sure I got one that had some serious gain to it. I ended up picking up a used Dekolink which has 60dB of gain. What's really nice is that is has separate gain control (manual and automatic) for uplink and downlink. So after switching to manual and cranking the downlink gain up, we are now getting 3 bars our of five in the middle of our office. Also, this BDA has the same standard antenna connectors so I didn't have to install another YAGI antenna. We just switch between them as we test.
Posted by David Adams at March 6, 2006 11:44 AM