passive mobile phone repeater

[andy]

Asking mostly out of curiosity on this one. Some friends of mine live in a
place in the mountains in Southern Spain. They can receive mobile phone
calls a few hundred yards from their house, on the top of a small rise,
but not further down where they are living. I was wondering when I was out
there to visit whether it would be possible to make a passive repeater by
putting up a large highly directional antenna on the hill pointing at the
mobile phone mast (there's an old power pylon which would do to mount it
on), and then connect it with coax to a smaller antenna by the house.
Would this work, or would you need some kind of active circuitry?


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[Michael A. Covington]

Passive repeaters for police radios are regularly used in side large
buildings. They work. Your main concern would be the loss in the cable, if
it's long. But try it! For the first experiment, the upper antenna need
not be directional.

"andy" <news4@earthsong.free-online.co.uk> wrote in message
newsan.2004.08.15.13.11.56.418200@earthsong.free-online.co.uk...

Asking mostly out of curiosity on this one. Some friends of mine live in a
place in the mountains in Southern Spain. They can receive mobile phone
calls a few hundred yards from their house, on the top of a small rise,
but not further down where they are living. I was wondering when I was out
there to visit whether it would be possible to make a passive repeater by
putting up a large highly directional antenna on the hill pointing at the
mobile phone mast (there's an old power pylon which would do to mount it
on), and then connect it with coax to a smaller antenna by the house.
Would this work, or would you need some kind of active circuitry?


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[/QUOTE]

 

[Joe McElvenney]

Hi,

... I was wondering when I was out
there to visit whether it would be possible to make a passive repeater by
putting up a large highly directional antenna on the hill pointing at the
mobile phone mast (there's an old power pylon which would do to mount it
on), and then connect it with coax to a smaller antenna by the house.
Would this work, or would you need some kind of active circuitry?

That is one of the classic methods of 'repeating' a signal if there is
enough of it. It was used years ago (in Cornwall, I think) to feed TV
signals to a village at the bottom of a cliff and seem to remember it as a
news item in one of the journals at the time.

Another possibility is a large reflecting sheet suitably angled. While in
Oman a few years ago, I tried to get one of the locals to try this from the
top of a Wadi near his home but he never got around to it.

If you were to use active circuitry by the way, it would have to be
bilateral which means that during quiet periods you might be transmitting
noise on the BTS input frequency which is a no-no.


Cheers - Joe