The Gold Coast and especially Sanctuary Cove is not a place you would expect to experience bad phone service, but add a few thick concrete walls within a large home for signal to penetrate and you've got a mobile phone dead spot that needs phone signal boosting.

Tin Can Solutions were called to diagnose why the phone service was so bad and what could be done to improve phone service within the home and on the pontoon. The customer had already tried the Cel-Fi PRO which is a DIY phone repeater/booster, but this residence was just too big and too many concrete walls for the PRO to work properly.

We conducted a site survey to diagnose where the signal was lacking and what was needed to improve phone service, and especially phone call drop-outs that the customer was experiencing.

Due to the size of the residence and the cellular bands being broadcast in the area, we specified the Cel-Fi G41 repeater which is a multi-carrier selectable repeater that works on one of the 3 Australian mobile phone network carriers Telstra, Optus or Vodafone and is selectable within the WAVE app. This project required 5 cellular antennas throughout the home so we used 2 Cel-Fi G41 through cellular combiners to make sure we had plenty of signal strength being broadcast.

We also wanted to make sure that we could tune our system into a specific Telstra tower so we used the RFI LPDA7040 11dbi directional LPDA antenna which is a neat looking antenna and performs very well in these locations. Using the LPDA antenna also means we can reduce the amount of noise coming from other cell towers in the area which increases the quality of the signal for the end user.

The customer is located on the canals and salt air has a massive impact on equipment installed outside, so we were asked to fabricate custom 316 stainless steel antenna poles for the main antenna and pontoon facing directional antenna. We also had to have a core hole drilled through the flat concrete roof to allow for the new CNT-400 coaxial cables to be installed. The roof has a waterproof membrane installed over it's entirety and the customer needed reassurance that the new hole would be sealed. We designed and fabricated a 316 stainless steel cable entry that has a removable lid sealed with an EPDM rubber seal and fixed to the roof with chemset bolts and sealed with Sika Construction AP sealant as specified by the customer. The enclosure was fabricated so the waterproofing company could then seal over the top of the base plate of the cable entry to double seal the penetration.

All cabling installation and terminations were handled by our technicians on-site along with mounting the equipment and installing electrical powerpoints to power up the system.

Once the installation was completed, as per our usual commissioning we conduct walk tests to confirm that signal has been improved in the areas required. The basement had absolutely no phone service prior to us installing the cellular distributed antenna system and now the customer can walk around their entire house without the fear of phone calls dropping out which is a must, especially if you ever needed to call an ambulance.

If you have phone service issues and you want to install your own phone tower in your home office or warehouse then contact us below.