After the last couple of camping road trips to Lightning Ridge and most recently a few weeks travelling around Tassie... poor 3G/4G reception in fringe areas (especially down Tassie West Coast) was a pain. Particular in providing internet for maps, wikicamp and appeasing SWMBO. So I installed a Cel-Fi GO 3G/4G Booster in readiness for an extended road trip up the East Coast to the Cape and back down through central Q'Land, NSW and into SA. Pretty straight forward with a roof mounted 6/8Db Blackhawk antenna.Rhino Rack adjustable antenna mount.
Cable cable tied to the Rhino Backbone and tracking down to the A Pillar cover.
An interesting find when I removed the A Pillar cover... clearly the Windscreen O'Brien crew spun me a yarn when they assured me that they would replace any mounting clips that they invariably would break when replacing the windscreen that we broke on our Lightning Ridge trip... all stuck down with silicon instead. So it gave me a chance to replace the clips... I got spares when I installed the UHF some time back.
A push rod, tape and petroleum jelly made the job of threading the antenna cable through into the cabin easy.
Running cables under the door floor plate to the B Pillar and mounting the booster unit on the seat belt cover, making sure to keep it low enough down the pillar so that it doesn't impede the seat side airbag from deploying and ensuring that the mounting screws are drimmed off so they can't snag the seat belts below.
Cel-Fi GO - 10.jpg
Fit off the cables from the external antenna and the internal antenna that will provide the boosted 4G signal into the cabin area. Power lead and internal cable run through to the back of the vehicle under the door floor plate and carpet so they can be plugged into the secondary battery CIG 12V plug so we can be powered up while travelling and while in camp.
The small internal antenna needs to be kept as distant as possible from the forward mounted roof antenna for best performance. We will need to play around with this to see what works best... for now it is up on the cargo barrier so we can move it further back into the rear of the vehicle or drop it lower. Time will tell but I think we have the key components in place for much better reception on the road.
Lowered for travel... no boost advantage in built up areas.
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