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I highly recommend this product. I now get 4 bars sitting at my desk where before I had zero.
It got worse when I moved into a metal siding and roof building for my office. The only way to get the phone to work was to hang it in the window or outside and use bluetooth to receive calls with my headset.
I have been fighting poor signal strength for a couple of years now for my business. Even better than advertising.
In my business a call could be several thousand dollars in business and missed calls may mean opportunity for my competition. This was a small investment comparitavely.
I plan to mount the antenna to a piece of pipe to get it even higher but it works very well as is with the antenna mounted on the highest point on the side of the building. It works especially well for me since I don't need reception to extend very far from the base unit.
Think carefully about higher frequency extenders if you have a weak signal. Not so. I had a weak signal and my service provider broadcasts at 1900 Mhz and 800 Mhz in my area. I assumed that the YX-500-PCS would work OK because the provider broadcasts at 1900 Mhz. The 1900 Mhz signal was not getting to my house because higher frequency signals are not as robust as low frequency signals. I exchanged the YX-500-PCS for the YX-500-CEL that operates in the 800 Mhz range, and the "CEL" version did an excellent job of solving my problem.
You can apparently buy better cable than comes with it, that keeps the signal from weakening and a directional antenna. This worked just as described. Occasionally I find I have to restart it to find a signal, but I think that may just be the signal suddenly coming back, than any reception problem by the unit. But even with the included antenna we often get five bars and a good enough signal strength to watch entire movies online with a broadband cell card. Well worth the money.
I haven't had a dropped call since installing this unit. I did mount the antena on the roof though.
The YX500-PCS works.I installed this booster for a camp in Missoui on the fringe of Sprint's network in order to boost the signal of a S720 EVDO card in a KR1 router. There's also plenty of wood and metal materals between the 2 antennas.-The YX500 is auto-magic. Placement, proximity, other devices, and bandwidth usage all seem to have some impact (positive or negitive) on the boosters behavior.Post install:The signal is not able to carry the same amazing EVDO rev A speeds as seen near the tower, but, it is much, much stronger and faster. Howerver, once the leaves came in and humidity went up the coverage went between -130dBm to none. Now they can stream the video weather forcast. Install wasn't a typical "plug and play" but instructions where clear. There's no tower within view on the horizon, but, they HAD a few bars of service in December. But there's plenty of environmental tuning to be done.
Here are a few observations from my install:-Within 5 minutes i found a good signal, but after about 2 hours of site survey I found a true "sweet spot."-I replaced the included (very long) RG6 with a 12ft coax and had better results. I'm not sure if the cable length should match wavelength, but, it's working. Before the YX500 they often experienced timeouts when browsing. I'd say the real up/down bandwith went form about 0-24Kbps to 240-360Kbps.I'm a bit us a skeptic when it comes to wireless technologies, but, this device appears to be working quite well.
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