Is a cellular signal booster a worthy investment?

We have been using a WeBoost cellular signal booster by Wilson Electronics for quite some time now, and it has been a game-changer for being able to stay in touch while getting away to some remote locations.

In a video on our YouTube channel, we give a quick overview of how the system works and how well it works for us.

We have the WeBoost 4G-X OTR edition, which is a trucker edition and has a much larger external antenna. Wilson has a newer version that is an RV edition, so it has a smaller external antenna that is designed to be a little sleeker and comes ready to mount to an RV ladder.

What is a booster?

Three main components make up a cell phone signal booster: an external antenna, a booster, and an internal antenna. The external antenna locks on to the closest cell phone signal it can find. It sends that signal inside through the booster pack. Wilson says their booster takes the signal up 32 times on the 4G-X. We’ve never tested it to see if that’s the case, but we can say the boost is significant. The booster sends the signal to an internal antenna that then rebroadcasts that now-stronger signal throughout your rig.

We have found it works great. We recently were camped in the Manistee National Forest in the northwestern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. On a Verizon phone, we had one bar of LTE most of the time. That would occasionally drop to a couple of bars of 3G. Whenever we turned on the WeBoost, we almost immediately jumped to three bars of LTE. At times, we saw that rise to 4 bars of LTE.

Each bar of service increases your cell phone upload and download speeds exponentially. So going from one bar to three or four bars would make a digital crawl feel lightning fast. It means that instead of struggling to upload one photo, you could easily send a batch of photos. And trying to send video with just one bar of signal is excruciating.

Is it a worthy investment?

Having the WeBoost is very important given that we’re still working full time and we both have jobs for which we need to be available around the clock. Being able to head out to enjoy nature and get some downtime but still have a cell signal available for work or play has proven to be a huge benefit.

The cost may seem prohibitive to some folks since a full set up will run about $500. It’s certainly an investment and not an impulse buy. But if you are going to get enough use out of it as we do, it’s an investment that makes a lot of sense.

Find out more about how the system works and why we like it in this video from our YouTube channel: