Technobabble

Cellular Repeaters

Posted by on Dec 6, 2005 | 4 Comments

Living in the boonies can present plenty of obstacles for a geek lifestyle from the lack of electronic retailers, to the dearth of broadband, and the rarity of solid cellular service. Thank heavens for the workarounds… and for the Gnomies that bring us brave tales of geekdom (and reports on cool gear, like cellular repeaters) from off the beaten path…

Regarding the No Cell Towers, No Problem piece, Gnomie Jack wrote about his invaluable cellular repeaters:

Your note caught my eye. While I’m not interested in a Sat Phone; I do live in a area with zero cell reception (rural, off the interstate routes, away from state roads, lots of trees and hills). I bought Wilson repeater/antenna sets for my house and truck. I’ve not had a failure to connect since; either while at home or anywhere on the road.

The home repeater is powered off my UPS so it stays up in the event of a power failure – a common occurrence where tree branches meet power lines a lot.

Total outlay was less then $800 and it doesn’t cost the buck to buck 75 per minute that a Sat phone costs.

All of a sudden, Bernadette Peters is singing “Into the Woods” in the back of my head, as Gnomie Russell writes from the middle of a serious forest:

That’s “Forest”. You know, lots of trees. Tall ones, too. Some several hundred feet tall. And do you know what trees do to Satellite signals? They block them. No Cell Towers? Lots of Problems!!!

While the trees could be too intense, a cellular repeater just might be worth looking into…

Related: Satellite Phone Systems,
Satellite Phone Rental, Satellite Broadband Internet

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=696846462 Brandon Carson

    I buy both… for my Jazz collection I’m always buying CDs, and I rip them to the Apple Lossless format… however, for current pop music that I want to carry with me on my iPhone, I buy iTunes songs or download MP3s… I think you’re absolutely right though — the audio quality of compressed music is just crapola. I worked at Dolby Labs last year and they opened my eyes to what audio quality really is… and compressed music throws away too much. Inevitable the quality will increase, but today’s kids who know nothing of CDs have no clue what they’re missing.

    • http://mvaudiothoughts.blogspot.com/ Michael

      Yeah like you say, younger kids are growing up rarely buying a CD. CDs have been exactly the same for years, the problem with them being nobody had any media player big enough to rip them at a decent rate. With storage today as it is though (i’m probably the far end of the scale on this having a 160GB iPod Classic), you can get loads of stuff at a high rate on even the cheaper media player. I may be a bit extreme but i have my entire library at lossless on my iPod.

  • Anonymous

    I always buy audio CDs, their sound quality is way better than any digital format. I only download either MP3 or FLAC the stuff that I don’t really care much about (i.e. Not Jazz or Classical)

  • Fattyjnl

    I see a typo! :D