Welcome to the first entry in May’s Medium Mod Contest. One Medium Mod will be published in every Email Alert in May. At the end of the month, we’ll hold a reader vote to determine May’s winner. Click here for information about the 2021 Mod Contest, including how to enter.
Reuben and April Zook, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania
Adding A Cell Booster To A Truck Camper
2017 Ford F-350
2021 Northern Lite 10-2EX CD LE
As you know, camping in remote areas doesn’t always offer strong cell signals. So, after reading many reviews, we joined the club and bought a WeBoost signal booster.
WeBoost says, “We don’t create a signal, but if one is there, we amplify it”. We need the internet when we travel, so this was an important experiment. Fortunately, it worked!
Instead of drilling holes in our roof, we just attached the telescoping rod antenna to the ladder, left a little extra slack in the cable, and secured it with electrical tape.
First, we took a hollow extension cleaning wand, cut the top off, and dropped the booster cable through the wand. The excess cable was fed through the bottom of the wand, and into the underside of the camper.
The main outdoor antenna was securely taped to the top of the wand.
There was an existing, but filled, hole in the bottom of the camper. We drilled through the fill and fed the cable through the hole, and into the body of the camper.
It’s important to have the booster signal amplifier/repeater secured, so it was mounted under the seat of the dinette. A hole was drilled into the dinette seat’s base to feed the signal cable from the amplifier/repeater over to the internal antenna.
Power is required, so we left the plug loose so it can be moved from either an inverter power cord or standard 110-volt electric when we’re plugged into shore power.
So far, the ability to raise the booster without much effort has been beneficial. If there’s a signal to be found, the WeBoost finds it and brings it closer to your phone via the interior desktop antenna.
Please note that your cellular device must be located very close to the interior antenna to receive the amplified signal. Also, signal strength may change based on the time of day and draw on the base signal, wherever it is being emitted from. We now have internet access through our cellular devices as a result of this mod.
For this mod, we bought an RV Cleaning Wand for $60 at the Hershey PA RV Show.
We also needed Gorilla tape, electrical tape, and spare parts that we had around our shop. We already had the WeBoost but, if you were to buy one, it runs around $500 online from WeBoost.
It took me two hours to complete this modification and cost about $570. In my opinion, the skill level of this modification is medium.
Disclaimer: The modifications above are submitted by Truck Camper Magazine readers. It is your responsibility to make sure that any do-it-yourself modification project you undertake is safe, effective, and legal for your situation.
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