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How to improve cell reception at home?

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raygg

Technical User
Jun 14, 2000
397
US
Our home is a levittown cape style 6 room home on a slab built ca. 1950 - but we completely rehabbed the house in the last 15 years stripping the walls to the studs and remodeling using wall insulation having no aluminum foil under sheetrock and skim coat plaster. All the electrical, plumbing and heating components were replaced during rehab, and the centrally located chimney was removed. The old asbestos shingles and underlying tarpaper exterior was stripped to the 12" pine board sheathing and replaced with tyvec, covered by a thin foil covered foamboard insulation and vinyl siding. We have iphones contracted with ATT in a thickly settled suburb of Boston and the cellphone reception inside the house is notably poorer than if we step outside. For this reason we retain a landline. This is a small house on a slab with a 30x40' footprint. We are surrounded on 3 sides by 7 70' oak trees. There are no tall buildings nearby and the terrain is slightly rolling but generally flat for several miles around - no significant hills.

Would purchase of the $99 ATT signal booster be worth it and where do I place it? Or is there a better solution to improve cell reception?

What causes the significant dropoff in reception inside the house?
 
the thin foil foamboard at a guess, you have the makings of a pretty decent Faraday cage. just need to wire all those foils together and ground it, and you would get no signal into the house. :) I am not familiar with the ATT booster if it is like the Sprint version, it requires broadband. There are cell boosters out there, that do not, and have an external antenna for picking up the cell signal, and then sending it to a transceiver. Something like this repeater works well in most instances. Link
 
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