Tony VE6MVP writes:

Folks

So I'm thinking about emergency communications and it seems to me that
an 800 Mhz Yagi antenna would be useful. I have one of those old
Motorola bag phones which I use when travelling in rural Alberta.

It works nice especially when on a 3' mag mount antenna on the vehicle
roof but it seems to me a Yagi up 20' might be useful at times.

Just try it. These things don't cost much, do they? Although you
already have a decent antenna.

Compared to the built-in antenna of a typical cell phone, it will make
a tremendous difference.

Here in Norway we have GSM, 900 MHz in rural areas. The signal is very
poor at our summer house. So we bought a 40$ 9 el. Yagi at a hardware
store and put it in a tree, may be 15 ft up. It's supposed to have 10
dB gain, but it comes with 33 ft of RG-58, so we lose more than half
the gain on the way. However, the built-in antenna of most cell phones
is unbelievably bad, and getting the antenna higher up makes a
lot of difference at our location. I went from 0 bars to 5.

The coax is marked "low loss" with nice, friendly letters. I guess
that's what does the trick :-)

73
Jon