T&T: Cell phone amplifiers

[Jim Fuller]

George,

My understanding is they were not home brew units.

Point to the list is, they go after the boat owner/operator, not the
installer/retailer/manufacturer.

Capt. Jim
Santa Cruz, CA
 


-----Original Message-----
From: George Hechtman [mailto:ghechtman at aol.com] 
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 12:12 PM
To: Trawlers & Trawlering
Cc: jfuller at svinet.com
Subject: T&T: Cell phone amplifiers


Jim Fuller wrote:

"I am surprised no one on the list has mentioned the liability of  
using a
repeater.

The FCC has been on a campaign to rid the world of improperly maintained
repeaters. That means you, the operator. It is not a problem for the
manufacturer, retailer or installer... they fine the owner/operator."

REPLY: Well, this post surprises me. We sold many thousands of the  
various flavors of these things at my old company. (Disclaimer: I  
still own a lot of stock in it!) About 95% were for land based or non- 
mobile applications, to be sure. Government agencies are big  
customers. All the units we sold, which were preponderantly Digital  
Antenna, but also others, were FCC and IC approved. All had circuitry  
to shut down and not work if oscillation occurred. We never heard the  
slightest whiff of a complaint from the FCC or anyone else.

Perhaps Jim is talking about some wild cat or home made units, non  
FCC approved; there have been problems with those in the past and the  
carriers contracts usually have language prohibiting them. But for  
the brands being discussed here this is simply a non-issue.

The issue here is the difficulty getting them installed correctly on  
a fiberglass boat. Vertical separation is much more effective than  
horizontal. The more stuff (especially metal stuff) twixt the two  
antennas the better. It's the type of thing that either works (like  
on Greg's boat) or not (like on Steve's).

Even though I have the keys to the candy store, so to speak, I kept  
my wired amp when I bought our Hatteras, a boat due to its size and  
the fact that there is an RF ground plane built into the flying  
bridge, would make it a good candidate for a repeater. Why? For one  
thing, where and how we are cruising, as I noted in a prior post,  
there are rare occasions where amplification is needed. For another,  
having the phone and air-card hooked up to the amp, devices like the  
Dock N Talk and Bluetooth hands free devices allow the phone devices  
to stay nice and safe inside if I want them to, and I can benefit  
from amplification indoors and out.  And lastly, it is portable for  
land and car use if need be. I might get around to installing a  
repeater at some point, since I don't like cables and it is not an  
economic issue for me, but right now I have plenty of other more  
valuable (to me) boat projects to spend time on.

George

In rainy Baltimore, procrastinating heavily