Perry and Cindy Mack
Words and Photos by Perry and Cindy Mack
When we were young, we wanted to (and did) run away from home. Teddy bear in hand (actually Smokey Bear, Mom was thinking ahead), we set off for places and adventures unknown. Now that we’re all grown up, we still do. It’s called RVing. Unfortunately, we have to work. The difference between then and now is that we’ve swapped Smokey bear for a cell booster, exchanging the warm cuddly comfort of an old toy for the comfort of connection on demand.
The further you get away from it all, the poorer your cell signal becomes, resulting in dropped calls, hard-to-understand reception, stalled texts and good ol’ dead zones. The right cell booster provides a reliable connection and wider coverage, plus faster upload speeds for work and faster download speeds for other important data (like streaming music and movies). All of this means we can stay in touch with the office and work remotely for an extra day (or more) before we have to go home. This is a huge plus.
As its name suggests, the Destination RV is used when your RV is parked. The directional antennae is mounted on a telescoping 7.6 m (25 ft) pole where it’s able to target and receive a signal far better than your handheld, ground-level phone. The system amplifies the signal for use throughout your RV and works with every carrier (except WiMax and iDen, which we’ve never heard of) and every phone available in North America. There are no subscription fees – you buy it, own it and use it.
weBoost (Wilson Electronics) says ‘it is a professional-grade model that provides up to 60 percent more reach than other car cell phone boosters’. Installation time is different for every RV. Ours was simple and only took a relaxed 60 minutes.
Without the booster, signal strength showed three bars on our old iPhone 6 Plus and when we connected to the booster, the phone had all four bars. Now it’s time to ‘run away’ to the backcountry, more confidently able to stay in touch and enjoy the entertainment provided by faster data.
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Emmet our bulldog watches (right) as we mount the outside antenna to the telescoping pole. This is a new simpler, more secure method over previous models.
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Slide the pole feet onto the pole, add the ground mount, and with the RV stabilized (with the jacks and wheel chocks in use) move the pole to the RV.
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Place the pole in a location where you have easy access to route the coax cable into the RV – we placed ours close to the slide. Make sure the RV is clean at your mounting points, place the mounting brackets 1.25 m (4 ft) apart and use a pencil to mark the locations, and a level to ensure the pole is vertical. Peel and stick the pole feet in place.
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Find a location for the booster in the RV that’s close to power, within reach of the 9 m (30 ft) coax cable and mount the red booster bracket with the provided two-sided tape. weBoost also provides a fused power supply if you want to wire to the booster directly rather than use an outlet in your RV.
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Mount the inside antenna at a minimum of 6 m (20 ft) from the outside antenna and check that they are pointing away from each other. We were able to mount the booster and inside antenna close together but we couldn’t hide them in a cabinet, which many other RV can accommodate.
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With the slide open enough, feed the coax cable from the outdoor antenna into the RV. Use the supplied flat parallel cable where the coax enters the slide and then close the slide completely. With another piece of supplied regular coax, connect the outside antenna cable to the port labelled outside and inside cable to the one marked inside.
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Plug the booster in! The light can be green, red or yellow and either solid or flashing. Ours was solid red for a couple of minutes before turning solid green, indicating that our system was working. If you get yellow, red, or a combination of flashing lights, use the easy-to-follow troubleshooting guide to get the best performance. weBoost provides coax cable long enough for large RVs; we’ll be replacing them with shorter pieces to clean up our install.
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Using a coax crimper and a couple of coax connectors. we made shorter cables to neaten our installation.