


Boats are usually a different situation, both because of their construction, location, and the devices used.įor devices such as a Peplink LTE router with existing external antennas, an amplifier may actually cause performance to be worse. Many people assume that adding one would only be good, and help improve overall signal and performance, but this is often not the case.Īmplifiers are a perfect solution for devices without external antennas such as smartphones and tablets, especially in a car/truck with lots of metal around, and where signal is in the mid-range. One thing you should carefully consider is whether you actually need an amplifier. There are a number of brands to choose from on the market, but the leader for some time in terms of performance on US LTE bands has been the weBoost Drive 4G-X. Devices close to the inside antenna should either have a usable signal in the worst case, or perform much better if their signal initially was low. The amplifier then increases the signal within various FCC limits, and re-broadcasts that signal on the inside antenna. They do this by using an outdoor antenna that has a better chance of picking up the remote signal, that are usually much larger than antennas on phones or other devices, and sending that signal to the amplifier. It is designed for use primarily in vehicles, and includes a 12v cigarette adapter style power cable and power supply.Ĭell amplifiers are designed to help improve the signal strength in areas where it is below a specific threshold – they’re not designed to improve signal or throughput in good quality signal areas. The Drive Reach is a cell phone signal booster with three major components – an outdoor antenna, amplifier and inside antenna. I have been using mine for a few months, and have some observations. WeBoost released the Drive Reach recently which is a more powerful and refined version of the venerable Drive 4G-X, the gold standard for cellular amplifiers since 2014.
