SmoothTalker cell booster.

[kayn1n32008]

When was the last time it was updated? Last time I checked, it was horribly out of date.

No idea honestly.

 

[mikewazowski]

My mistake, looks like it was last update October 2016. I did a quick spot check and it looks correct.

 

[Rred]

In the US those apps are a joke. The cellular companies are (officially) concerned about sabotage and competitors, so most of the cell sites here do not show up--even on official government lists. They get very paranoid and outright hostile if you try to get that information from them. After all, you might be a very unhappy customer who wants to know where the tower is, so you can burn it down. Honest. (Yeah, they know what happens when your business model is based on helixing the rubes.)

And our FCC is quite content with that.

If you want to find out what tower or service you are reaching, better to run an app on the phone which will interrogate the local tower(s) and show you what the active connection options are.

FWIW.

 

[kayn1n32008]

In the US those apps are a joke. The cellular companies are (officially) concerned about sabotage and competitors, so most of the cell sites here do not show up--even on official government lists. They get very paranoid and outright hostile if you try to get that information from them. After all, you might be a very unhappy customer who wants to know where the tower is, so you can burn it down. Honest. (Yeah, they know what happens when your business model is based on helixing the rubes.)

And our FCC is quite content with that.

If you want to find out what tower or service you are reaching, better to run an app on the phone which will interrogate the local tower(s) and show you what the active connection options are.

FWIW.

FWIW, the OP is in Canada.

 

[Rred]

"FWIW, the OP is in Canada."
Yes, I read that.
Do the Canadian cellcos treat their customers any better?
Does the regulator actually require tower sites to be published? Our FCC "requires" it, but also does not require it.
That's why I point out there are issues which may very well apply up there as well, and that using an app to find out the actual tower being worked is still the most reliable way to do it, unless you know for a fact that the Canadian government and carriers aren't playing the same games.

 

[Soundy]

I recently had to track down a Uniden unit that was causing interference to a site 5 miles away. The manual called for a minimum separation between inside and outside antennas that the owner ignored. Luckily adding attenuation solved the issue.

It's almost a weekly occurrence where myself or one of my colleagues has to track down one of these rogue units.

Manual? What's that?

SmoothTalker‘s site contains nothing but marketing material; I'd love to find a manual.

Actually, by tomorrow it will be moot; we'll head back to the city, the booster will go back to its owner, and I'll shop for something with better support.

Sent from my SM-N900W8 using Tapatalk

 

[MTS2000des]

One might suggest that there's a huge difference between the top of an urban skyscraper, and a unit deployed in a cabin in an area with marginal service. And even more of a difference with those units deployed inside Faraday cages, aka "mobile installations".

Unless one is an RF engineer and has a calibrated spectrum analyzer and has done due diligence, how does one know just because one is "in a cabin" that they aren't causing problems in band or out of band? Just because a tree falls in a forest...

Faraday cages do have holes sometimes. RF can't always be as contained as we like it to.

Not that it is a bad thing to conform with FCC regulations, but the cellco carriers are such malicious, inept, hostile antagonists so much of the time, that there are good reasons a user would just never want to call one.

I am no fan of the telecom cartels. But at the end of the day, as a subscriber we have to play by their (often one sided) rules and the FCC rules. We are just subscribers on their networks, and any network operator, friend of foe, has a right to know what is operating on their licensed spectrum.

FWIW all public safety BDA's in my jurisdiction require myself or my colleagues to come out, do a site survey, review as-builts, and confirm the system operates properly before we allow building inspectors to sign off.

This is really the way it SHOULD be. BDAs and DAS are not consumer devices and can be as bad (or worse) than Chinese radios out of the box on public safety/part 90 frequencies.

 

[MTS2000des]

Manual? What's that?

SmoothTalker‘s site contains nothing but marketing material; I'd love to find a manual.

Actually, by tomorrow it will be moot; we'll head back to the city, the booster will go back to its owner, and I'll shop for something with better support.

Kind of illustrates my point and why, as a public safety radio professional, I am very concerned about devices like this being marketed and sold to the general public/consumers with no/poorly written documentation.

A recipe for disaster. On the other hand, it's job security for folks like me.

 

[kayn1n32008]

On the other hand, it's job security for folks like me.

Sure is. One of the members of this board, who works for one of the largest Canadian Telephone Cartels sees the effects of poorly installed BDA systems. Every year when the winter drilling season starts up, the interference begins, and he chases it all winter, only to see it go away in the spring.

 

[MTS2000des]

Sure is. One of the members of this board, who works for one of the largest Canadian Telephone Cartels sees the effects of poorly installed BDA systems. Every year when the winter drilling season starts up, the interference begins, and he chases it all winter, only to see it go away in the spring.

It's only going to get worse. The combination of garbage pail electronics from China, the lack of real oversight by the FCC (how does Canada stack up in this department?), and consumers buying this stuff by the truckload means no end to interference in sight.

In the USA, terrestrial AM and FM OTA radio is hurting not just because listeners are going online, but reception in many places is becoming problematic. LED traffic lights can be as bad (or worse) than an oscillating BDA gone wild.

 

[kayn1n32008]

It's only going to get worse.

I agree. With Alberta going to a province wide 700MHz trunk system, and the Cartel Carriers deploying 700MHz LTE, I foresee thing getting worse here too. Couple that with every drill rig having a BDA... Well it's a perfect storm. Actually there are lots of companies deploying BDA where signal strength is weak. Especially in the oil patch(pretty much all of Alberta) some use it for data, some voice. There is also a trend for companies to go to cellular for SCADA as well.

The combination of garbage pail electronics from China, the lack of real oversight by the FCC (how does Canada stack up in this department?), and consumers buying this stuff by the truckload means no end to interference in sight.

IC(or what ever they are calling themselves these days) is reactive and ONLY when complaints are received. My friend usually only needs to suggest calling them, telling uncooperative customers with oscillating BDAs what fines can potentially be and they usually get real cooporative real fast.

 

[mikewazowski]

We have a hand out we leave with the interferer that spells out what the penalties are if we have to involve Industry Canada.

Last one I had was a booster on a solar farm in the middle of nowhere. Unit was installed in a metal shelter which according to someone participating in the thread should have activated as a Faraday cage but he forgets the donor antenna is mounted outside the Faraday cage and radiates. They were extremely cooperative and we had it resolved fast.

 

[kayn1n32008]

We have a hand out we leave with the interferer that spells out what the penalties are if we have to involve Industry Canada.

Last one I had was a booster on a solar farm in the middle of nowhere. Unit was installed in a metal shelter which according to someone participating in the thread should have activated as a Faraday cage but he forgets the donor antenna is mounted outside the Faraday cage and radiates. They were extremely cooperative and we had it resolved fast.

Our 'cell guy' at work has so little understanding of how BDAs work, he was wanting to reuse the Wilson direct connect BDAs, that were used on our fleet of old M800 CDMA hard mounted phones(I miss my M800, great phone, that had one of the best speaker phones ever.) with cradles and our smart phones that did not have any way to be direct connected. Even after explaining that the direct connect amplifiers would cause serious interference if used how he wanted to, he still wanted to reuse them.

Additionally, he was having the donor antennas installed on the fenders, rather than on the roof like Wilson requires in their documentation.

When I was having my cell booster installed in my first new work truck, he wanted to fender mount the antenna, and use a crappy amplifier. It was so frustrating, I had to tell him if it was not getting installed properly, to not bother installing it at all.

 

[techman210]

I have seen simple "BDA without the BDA" installations work as good as WITH the BDA. Just a indoor omni connected by high quality cable to a outdoor yagi. Just a passive setup.

Putting a BDA in a mobile environment is just asking for trouble. Parking or driving past a cell site likely drives the BDA into unusable compression, or self-oscillation. The best case scenario, is that it overloads and destroys the BDA RX preamp.

Another hideous consumer device that I have seen are "GPS repeaters" often sold and installed by unscrupulous public safety outfitters, supposedly to get the GPS signals into the in-vehicle MDC. I believe the FCC came out and made it clear that these are prohibited.

 

[Soundy]

IC(or what ever they are calling themselves these days) is reactive and ONLY when complaints are received.

Not uncommon with a lot of agencies up here, really - there's a huge area to cover, and very limited resources/manpower to cover it.

Same thing happens with would-be ham operators in the off-roading world I'm in: guys want to get VHF for back-roads communications, someone informs them they need a ham license, some other clown pipes up how he's been operating without one for umpteen years and never had a problem (as if that makes it legal). One of the benefits of obtaining the proper license, I like to point out, is that if you travel to the US, the FCC is infinitely more anal about unlicensed usage - when California alone has the same population as all of Canada, unlicensed operators can be a far bigger problem, and the FCC can easily dedicate far more resources to actively tracking them down.