Why & how to perform site survey prior to booster installation?

Watch video below providing information about Site Surveys prior to cell phone antenna booster installation - What it is, how to perform one, benefits of doing a site survey, and the tools required. It also provides a site-survey checklist for performing a cell phone signal booster site survey without missing essential details. If you require professional installation, please contact us for a quote.

SureCall Site Survey Series Episode 1 Discusses Conducting a Site Survey for Certified Installers and Solution Design Specialists. What do you need in order to be able to conduct a proper site survey? How does it help you with the design process? So, there are a couple of different things you're going to need in order to be able to conduct a proper site survey. The first thing is going to be a copy of the commercial installation questionnaire that we provides on our website at https://www.signalbooster.com/pages/cell-phone-booster-installation-service-questionnaire which you can go ahead and print it out and take it with you.

For a lot of us, this isn't necessarily a primary business focus as far as installing signal boosters. So, it is really nice to have a couple of these forms on your truck when you're in the building for other jobs, you may be doing alarm systems, may be doing Wi-Fi, running cable for telecommunications. It is nice to have this so that you can go ahead and get all the information right away instead of needing to schedule another time to go back to that same location and get all of the signal readings, all of the dimensions, all of that kind of stuff. Another thing that you're going to need is a signal meter.

Now, for some of your smaller jobs, your residential jobs, those kinds of things, it's okay to use your cell phone to get an idea of what kind of signal you're working withoutside. But if you're looking to conduct a proper and complete site survey, you really do need to make sure that you either have a spectrum analyzer or a wideband carrier neutral signal meter. And we do have those available over at surecall.com so make sure you gocheck it out.

The signal meter is really going to help you in a couple of different ways. Number one, if you're going with your cell phone, your cell phone only supports one carrier and the signal boosters support multiple carriers. And also the carrier that your customer is using may not necessarily match with the one that you're using toactually do the signal readings with the phone. So, you really want to make sure that you've got a signal meter that does multiple different carriers so you can really get an idea of what kind of signal strength you have to begin with. So just to kind of give you an idea, we're looking for a signal strength anywhere between about a negative 95 dB and a negative 45 dB. So, if it's worse than negative 95, that's not really enough signal for us to be able to work with as far as the boosters are concerned. If it's over a negative 45, that's too strong and the booster will think that it's too close to the outside cellular tower, and it will actually begin to shut down or go into an overpowering mode.

Along with getting your signal strength readings outside of the building, you really want to make sure that you get them inside the building as well. You want to make sure you identify either on the floor plans or on your site survey where the trouble spots are inside that building because that's what essentially what SureCall boosters do is they fix dead spots. So, you have to know where those dead spots are in order to be able to fix them. So make sure you identify those dead spots. Take the signal readings and that way, after you're done with your job, you can go ahead and go back to your customer and say, hey this is what I had in this area before. This is what I've got now and your customer is going to be able to see that the booster is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

Another thing you're going to need to do is make sure you fill out the site survey completely, and I say this with as much emphasis as I can because you really want to make sure that you get the approximate dimensions on there. You want to make sure you get the carriers that are needed from your customer. You really want to make sure that you get the signal strength that is available out there. You want to make sure that you find out if your customer needs plenum cable. All those kinds of things need to be indicated on the site survey. You don't want to have to go back to the customer weeks later and say, oh yeah, we forgot to get this information. Make sure you get the dimensions. Make sure you get accurate signal readings. Make sure that you find out how many people are going to be expected on the phone at the same time. Those are all very important things you're going to need on that site survey.

Once you have all that information, it can sometimes be a little bit challenging to get the design taken care of but we at SureCall actually operate free to use design configuration assistance program for applications that are typically over 10,000 square feet. So, once you have all that information, once you have the floor plan, go ahead and send that to us and we can go ahead and get a design ready for you so you can go ahead and take that information back to your customer and go ahead and get that signal booster installed. Also, another way that we really want to make sure that you're ready and prepared for this installation is that we actually offer free certified installer program classes every single week.