How Strike Alpha Cradle Antennas Work

What are External Phone Antennas?

External phone antennas are usually used to improve signal strength in comparatively low network signal locations. There are basically two types of cell phone antennas - internal antennas and external antennas. An internal antenna refers to the antenna that is built into the cell phone, while external antennas are the antennas that you connect to your cell phone to increase the signal further.

How do Strike Alpha Cradle Antennas Work?

Strike Alpha Cradle features an internal passive antenna that is specifically incorporated to improve your mobile signal once used with an external antenna. The cradle comes with an SMA connector, so it can be easily connected to an external antenna. This solution simply captures more of the signal from outside the vehicle and transfers it to the phone inside the car.

How External Mobile Phone Antennas Work on Vehicles

Getting an external antenna and positioning it as high as you can on your vehicle is the best practice. The highest point of a vehicle is perfect which is often a roof rack or roll bar. Sometimes, it's not ideal to have your external antenna on a roof rack. However, there are antennas available in the market like the Strike B3 Antenna that has a removable whip system for seamless removal and re-attachment based on your needs which allows an antenna to be placed as high as possible. Other location options include gutter mount, fender mount, or bulbar mounted.

Once your antenna is positioned, essentially you have a bigger antenna than what's on your mobile phone. With a properly tuned quality antenna, you will then be capturing the signal from a large antenna in a good location. From there the signal travels down a high-efficiency low-loss cable to your cradle.

It is important to note that external antennas do not create signal by themselves, they receive signal and then radiate that signal to a different location. An external antenna captures a mobile phone signal from a better location and transfers it to your phone. If there's no mobile phone signal where the external antenna is, then it's not going to be able to do anything. Antennas do not invent a mobile phone signal.

Pairing a Strike Alpha car cradle with a Strike antenna will give you the best chance of improving your signal in rural, fringe, or low signal areas.

Check out this video for more information on how our antennas work.