BDA for home use

[speedway_navigator]

I'm testing a SmoothTalker Z6 BDA for our house (Verzion phones) and wondered if anyone has any experience with this model or other brands. We have double pane E glass windows that have about 10dB loss, I usually see -110 dBm near the windows and loss 3-5 dB going through the house which either drops the call or loses/garbles audio. A friend switched from Verizon to T mobile on his phone and dramatically reduced his dropped call rates, we have not tested it in my house.

My first test showed less signal than with the unit off, the LEDs on the BDA indicated not enough separation between antennas. I just realized my RF explorer spec an has a 30 dB error so I can't measure signal strength on the donor antenna. The BDA has 18' of RG-6 on the donor antenna, the indoor antenna can be mounted on the unit or comes with a 30' extension cable. I can't get a good line sweep because my VNA is 50 ohms.

I used the indoor extension cable but with my attic space limitations only got about 20' of separation on my first test. I ran the coax on the floor for my 2nd test and the BDA reduced its attenuation so I'm the process of adding another 25' of coax to give me length of the house separation.
Unfortunately the draw string I ran in the rafters when I ran cat 5 last year got stuck in the joints between the 2x4s so I won't be able to finish my coax run until I run PVC pipe. I didn't realize Mr Murphy followed us when we moved from California.

My cousin had a no name offshore BDA that crapped out so he got the Verizon network extender. It works fine for his winery, or maybe his customers suffer from mental attenuation after a few samples and don't notice the dropouts. I tried an early version of this and had problems with audio quality and it was a bandwidth hog, calls dropped during large file FTP sessions.

 

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

Is the donor antenna an omnidirectional? If you could get a log periodic for the 6 bands that has decent directivity you could improve the antenna isolation and point to a decent cell site. If you don't need all 6 bands, a proper 6 element yagi might work out.

I have designed BDA installs for public safety, it is definately not an out of box solution like these retailers would like to convince the public. In commercial and public buildings, the construction is often masonry or CBS so isolation is pretty much ensured. But a frame construction home at the fringe of cellular coverage can be a pain because isolation is poor and the gain is needed.

Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk

 

[speedway_navigator]

They offer / recommend yagis for sites >6 miles from a site. A friend of mine is a consulting engineer with a BDA integrator in St Louis, they talk with engineers from the carriers to determine which site to point to. With dynamic load sharing / beam forming increasing as small cells pop up, the old days of going to a macro may not be the preferred option. I have the standard 2.15 dBi gain donor. The BDA shows it's attenuating by 6-9 dB on the UL side.

The 2 band unit they sell only covers 800 and 1900. I assumed I was on 13 but LTE discovery says I'm on 4, so I may have screwed myself by going with the 6 band unit.
According to this I'm about 1.2 miles from a band 13 site and under a mile from 2 band 4s.
Cellular Tower and Signal Map

Dane said they have found some self installed BDAs pointing to the wrong carrier's site based solely on signal strength.
Now that spring is here and we have windows open our signal strength has gained enough the BDA could be more of a problem than an asset until we start hitting 100+ temps and close windows again.

 

[12dbsinad]

If you all have Verizon and internet connection, get yourself a mini cell. It'll work 100 times better than any BDA.

 

[n5ims]

If you all have Verizon and internet connection, get yourself a mini cell. It'll work 100 times better than any BDA.

If Verizon is anything like my experience with Sprint you'll save money and hassle to boot. With the dropped calls we were experiencing all I had to do was call the Sprint Customer Service number (and work my way up to a second level tech that's actually authorized to fix things, not just try to find a way to blame the customer) they sent out one of their pre-configured mini cell units. It was literally plug and play (you did have to wait for 4 green lights before the phones would start using it though). It failed once and a call to Sprint got them to send a replacement and a pre-paid return package for the no longer working unit. When I left Sprint, I did have to return the unit to them, but after a simple call, they quickly sent a pre-paid return package for that unit as well. Be aware that with Sprint, you had to be a US customer and the unit had to be in the US for it to work (the built-in GPS made sure of that).

 

[12dbsinad]

If Verizon is anything like my experience with Sprint you'll save money and hassle to boot. With the dropped calls we were experiencing all I had to do was call the Sprint Customer Service number (and work my way up to a second level tech that's actually authorized to fix things, not just try to find a way to blame the customer) they sent out one of their pre-configured mini cell units. It was literally plug and play (you did have to wait for 4 green lights before the phones would start using it though). It failed once and a call to Sprint got them to send a replacement and a pre-paid return package for the no longer working unit. When I left Sprint, I did have to return the unit to them, but after a simple call, they quickly sent a pre-paid return package for that unit as well. Be aware that with Sprint, you had to be a US customer and the unit had to be in the US for it to work (the built-in GPS made sure of that).

Verizon is getting better IMHO. I do have experience with Sprint and T-Mobile in the past and I never had a problem with either as far as customer service and getting the service to work, especially in your home.

But yeah, the mini cells work great and it's a win win for both customer and wireless provider. It relieves congestion on the cell sites themselves with limited frequencies / bandwidth and it eliminates BDA's which in general can be a nightmare to cellular companies with interference.

Some day hopefully public safety systems will realize this and start implementing other technologies for in-building coverage besides BDA's. But that's a whole other subject.

 

[Thunderknight]

Femtocells work great for routine use...but the failing is that they require internet access. The nice thing about a BDA is you can put backup power on it and it will work even if your internet connection or local power fails.

The other option is WiFi calling instead of a femtocell. WiFi calling is a solution for a more permanent set of users (home, small office). A place with a lot of transient users (visitors) work better with a BDA or femtocell...so it's transparent to the user.