hey everybody it’s lon seidman and we’re taking a look today at a smartphone signal booster from wilson this is their we boost home studio and this is designed for an apartment or a single room it’s the most affordable product that they make for boosting cell phone signals we’re going to take a look at how this one works in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this came in free of charge from weboost however all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this smartphone booster is all about now there are two price points for this product there is a light edition that comes in at 199 and then there’s the regular studio edition which is what this one is that sells for 349.
the difference between the light version of the studio product and the regular studio is carrier compatibility so the light edition only works with t and t and verizon but this one the regular studio edition that’s a little bit more expensive works with all the us carriers so if you have a verizon or an att phone there’s no reason to buy the more expensive one you can just get the light edition and you’ll get the same performance as you’ll see out of this one but if you have people visiting often and you don’t know what cell service they’re on this one will work with all of the major us carriers now the way this works is that you have an antenna that goes outside they give you some hardware that you can strap to a pole or something to get it positioned correctly the best place to put it is probably up on a roof and it’s highly directional so you want to point this in the direction that your cell phone tower is located nearest to where you live and you can adjust things just by moving it so it might take a little bit of time to get it into the right spot and then what you do is run some rg6 cable from the antenna into the room in which you want the booster to work and they do give you a good amount of rg6 cable in the box i think about 30 feet or so but you might need more of it so you’ll have to measure out what your particular needs are and then what you do is you attach the antenna outside with that rg6 cable
to the amplifier box here inside and what this will do is amplify the signal coming in and then also amplify the signal coming out of your phone back out and it will work with lte along with some of the 5g technology as well and if you’re in a situation where your phone works outside the home but not inside the home this will likely get that outside signal to work inside your house as well as it does when you’re out of the house and we’ll show you a test we did with that in a few minutes now wilson has some larger multi-room systems available this one as i mentioned at the outset is designed for a single room or a small apartment this has a power supply that delivers five volts at 2.5 amps so it’s definitely not going to cover an entire house so if you’ve got a larger space to cover you’re going to need something a little bit more powerful and more expensive so now what i want to do is show you the results of a test that we ran a little bit earlier i have a room in my basement that is basically underneath my front porch so it is surrounded by concrete it’s got a metal roof it is pretty much a faraday cage for any smartphone that goes in there it loses its signal to the cell phone tower and of course it loses its wi-fi signal so what we do to test these boosters out is we take the antenna here and basically just stick it out the window i don’t even put it up on the roof or anything because i want to get a really worst case scenario test going we run the cable out to the booster and we bring the booster into the faraday cage in the basement and see if we can get the cell phone to get a signal and we’ve done this with other wii boost boosters in the past then they tend to work pretty well and this one is no exception all right so here’s a test that we ran a little bit earlier in the bunker so you can see my phone here has no signal at all and what we’ve got in the right hand corner there is my smart switch app and what i did is i hooked up the booster to a smart plug so i could click on the button there turn it on and see what the result is so we just turned it on there and about five or ten seconds later the phone suddenly gets a signal and it can start transacting data here as you can see that app that it was
running lit right up and got reconnected to the server and all was good so this is pretty much working as advertised we put it in a room where it didn’t have a signal at all but because we put the booster in there and we hooked up the booster to the antenna we were able to get a signal and start transacting data i made a phone call on it to my wife you can hear what that sounds like here yeah can you hear me yeah do i sound okay yeah yeah you um that’s not good it sounds like echoey right not bad actually though yeah i’m in the uh i’m in the basement so that’s that’s probably why it’s doing that okay good well thank you i’m glad the phone call worked all right and we also did some data tests let’s have a look at those all right so here’s a look at the speedtest.net app running on the phone again through the booster in the bunker and as you can see here we’re not getting great speeds but actually this is what i get when i’m out in my backyard so i’m not in a very good area to begin with here so we’re getting about two megabits or so downstream and again that’s what i see outside and then on the upstream we’re getting about half a megabit or so and again this is actually in line with my experience when i am actually sitting in my backyard and of course if we got this thing high up on the roof and pointed in the right direction we would likely see better performance going to the booster i just know though again that this booster is not as powerful as some of the other ones that they make so the performance will drop off the further away from the booster pack here that you get now there are some indicator lights here on the top and what you want to make sure is that those lights are lit up green which tells you that all of the bands that it supports are currently
working there are some safeguards built in to prevent what’s called oscillation basically having the signal bounce back and forth between the antenna and the booster and if it detects oscillation it’s going to shut that band down and you’ll see your signal strength go away we saw that happening when we were testing this a little bit earlier on a live stream so make sure those lights are lit up green and then you’ll have to manually move the antenna around until your phone gets the strongest signal now before you go out and buy one of these things and get up on the roof and put the antenna up you should check out wi-fi calling which is a feature that’s available for free on most of the major carriers and is supported by most of the major smartphone manufacturers as well and when you get home and you have wi-fi calling enabled your phone will route all of its calls through the internet over your home wi-fi and that might be a solution to the signal issues that you might be having something like this though of course will be more reliable in the case of a power outage or the internet going out but if you’re just trying to solve a problem quickly and cheaply wi-fi calling might be a consideration some carriers may also provide some kind of booster to you as well for free as part of your plan you might want to call customer service about that but if you’re really just trying to solve the problem yourself once and for all something like this could work pretty well these also work well for folks that are driving cross-country in an rv who want a better signal wherever they are this will of course work for that if you can get the antenna up high enough and of course this booster is perfect for a small space like an rv or something along those lines so there’s definitely a use case for this as we’ve seen with this and other boosters that we’ve looked at from wilson the manufacturer of weboost these do tend to
work very well even in my faraday cage over there but again i would try the wi-fi calling first to see if that solves your problem and if not you can jump into something like this which will certainly get the job done that is going to do it for this one until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters brian parker jim peter tom albrecht frank lewandowski mark bollinger and chris allegretta if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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