Austad, Jay wrote: > > A few companies out there make "Passive Repeater" antennas, where you put > the antenna outside your building connected to one inside, an it relay's > cellular signals in and out for places with bad reception. > > How would I build one of these? I bought one which was supposed to work > with GSM 1900, and it doesn't do a damn thing. As far as I can tell, it's > an antenna mounted to a cheap plastic base and that's it. Other ones I've > seen have a metal pad on the base and you stick one on each side of a > window, but mine doesn't have this. Maybe that's why it was so cheap. All a passive repeater really is is two antennas that are connected together. They tend to work best when you have a situation where you have a fairly strong signal and then have a nearby area where the signal is blocked for some reason. You put up an antenna where it can catch the strong signal and connect it via coax to another antenna that can resend the signal into the blocked area. One example of this is the big flat panels mounted at an angle on the smoke stacks at the power plants around town. They have microwave dishs on the ground pointed at the panels to bounce signals off of them. -- Bryan Halvorson bryan at edgar.sector14.net