Baby_Beluga
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First off, allow me to apologize if I don't have the right forum, if the question has been asked and answered elsewhere, and if my question is just too much of a beginner question for this site...
I'm a pretty serious tinkerer but electronics is fairly new to me: still don't have a lot of the language and still don't have hardly any of the math, but I've had a few surprising "successes" that have encouraged me to soldier on. It's like legos, only for grownups. Wish I'd discovered electronics fifteen years ago, when I was young enough I could learn all this stuff quickly.
My current project is to build passive signal repeaters to improve the cellular service inside my house. I realize that they are not likely to be very powerful (and that many believe they don't work at all--guess I won't know for sure until I build and test!) but I don't need them to be powerful: I just need to stop dropping calls when I walk from the living room to the kitchen.
My question, however, is not about that but about signal amplifiers. Perhaps I just don't know the right search terms (very possible, and I'd appreciate suggestions) but I haven't been able to find anything online about how they work, how to build one, and so on. You see, in my research I find that most folks will just tell you, "buy a repeater" and "only amplified repeaters work." My instincts, and my very poor understanding of antenna science tells me otherwise: as I see it, a passive repeater works by side-stepping signal loss in one way or another. Also, I don't like buying things I don't understand if I can build something that I do.
I got to thinking... and started wondering, what if you had a repeater that was basically passive, but only amplified the signal a little, little bit? I've heard that making your own amplified repeaters can be illegal and even dangerous (for neighbors with pacemakers) and I certainly don't want any trouble from that department, but it seemed to me like a very tiny boost would be awfully helpful inside the house, and could probably be designed in such a way as to stay withing legal power limits. My thought is that a little solar panel could be used, or (and I'll be posting another question about this elsewhere) that I could maybe even harvest the power from the repeater itself.
So, my question is, how do radio signal amplifiers work? Can I build one?
I'm perfectly willing to do the research and the work of figuring this out, but don't seem to know the right things to search for, so while an actual answer would be lovely, I would also greatly appreciate links to relevant sites as well as suggestions for search terms that might be useful to me.
Thanks!
I'm a pretty serious tinkerer but electronics is fairly new to me: still don't have a lot of the language and still don't have hardly any of the math, but I've had a few surprising "successes" that have encouraged me to soldier on. It's like legos, only for grownups. Wish I'd discovered electronics fifteen years ago, when I was young enough I could learn all this stuff quickly.
My current project is to build passive signal repeaters to improve the cellular service inside my house. I realize that they are not likely to be very powerful (and that many believe they don't work at all--guess I won't know for sure until I build and test!) but I don't need them to be powerful: I just need to stop dropping calls when I walk from the living room to the kitchen.
My question, however, is not about that but about signal amplifiers. Perhaps I just don't know the right search terms (very possible, and I'd appreciate suggestions) but I haven't been able to find anything online about how they work, how to build one, and so on. You see, in my research I find that most folks will just tell you, "buy a repeater" and "only amplified repeaters work." My instincts, and my very poor understanding of antenna science tells me otherwise: as I see it, a passive repeater works by side-stepping signal loss in one way or another. Also, I don't like buying things I don't understand if I can build something that I do.
I got to thinking... and started wondering, what if you had a repeater that was basically passive, but only amplified the signal a little, little bit? I've heard that making your own amplified repeaters can be illegal and even dangerous (for neighbors with pacemakers) and I certainly don't want any trouble from that department, but it seemed to me like a very tiny boost would be awfully helpful inside the house, and could probably be designed in such a way as to stay withing legal power limits. My thought is that a little solar panel could be used, or (and I'll be posting another question about this elsewhere) that I could maybe even harvest the power from the repeater itself.
So, my question is, how do radio signal amplifiers work? Can I build one?
I'm perfectly willing to do the research and the work of figuring this out, but don't seem to know the right things to search for, so while an actual answer would be lovely, I would also greatly appreciate links to relevant sites as well as suggestions for search terms that might be useful to me.
Thanks!