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weBoost Connect Signal Booster

• February 2015
• Gadgetry Gear Reviews

I live in Moab, but I have a small off-the-grid octagonal house near Indian Creek on 20 acres of land. When I was writing “Learning to Fly” I had the idea that I would be able to write the book very easily if I had a writer’s cabin, so I decided to use some of the book advance to build it (I already had the land). Building projects being what they are, the book was done before the cabin was….but, maybe for the next book. There is a little bit of cell service at the cabin, but at a very frustrating level. The cell phone will show some bars, and occasionally even a tantalizing 3G, but just doesn’t want to work beyond squeezing out the occasional text message here and there. Since most of my work involves being connected, it’s hard for me to disappear down at the cabin for multiple days if I’m completely unreachable, and so it actually limits the time I can spend there. Which is obviously no good.

weBoost sent me the WeBoost Connect 4G Signal Booster Kit for review, and several wonderful things happened as a result!! Since there’s no power at my cabin, we had to connect the booster to an old (too small) solar battery that I had already–I do plan to get a bigger one soon because the booster is worth it. Since the battery is pretty small, the booster runs through it fairly quickly, but that’s the “fault” of the wrong tool for the wrong job. But the booster immediately improved the signal to the point that I could Instagram (that seems to be the most data-intensive application, even more so than Facebook), and simple things like email, text and voice calls became a complete success. We can even pair laptops to the cell phones and use internet off the laptops, which is a huge technological advancement at the octabin.

Even more fantastic, from my point of view, was that the setup instructions gave a link to put an app on the iphone which converts the irritating bar indicators into a number figure. Since I spend almost all of my time moving around areas with extremely spotty cell service, I am constantly frustrated by the bar indicators on my cell phone, because they are so misleading. Sometimes the phone will show 4 bars, and even a 3G sign, and it still doesn’t work. The link the instructions gave shows you how to change those bars to a number, and the number will give you a far more specific and realistic indicator of whether you should even bother trying to use the phone. They give you this app information so you can use it to set up the outside antenna in the best spot. That was great, but having this feature has been a huge improvement on my phone, and I use it all the time now. This knowledge alone would have been worth getting the booster! ;D

In short, the WeBoost Connect Signal Booster is fairly simple and straightforward, has excellent instructions, and it works!