(NEW) weBoost Destination RV - Cell Phone Signal Booster

I hate long reviews, and I especially hate paid or product sponsored reviews. I just don't trust them. So here's a real human customer putting the important details up front. The Weboost destination RV actually works. And so far, it works really well! It took my Verizon data speed from 0.5mb down and up to about 4-5, sometimes 9mb. I'm actually kinda surprised (I'll explain why below). T-Mobile though is actually slower, less than 0.2mb (I'm curious if they throttle boosted signal---again, will explain below). It's easy to install, but takes a little time and attention. The box has a ton of little boxes with images telling you what's inside each. I bought some 1.5" velcro straps from Home Depot to secure it to my Airstream awning and, the best part, is I was able to wire the external antenna to my external satellite coax on my Airstream allowing me to avoid putting wires through windows and doors. Now, the booster and antenna are nice and tidy in my overhead storage. Ok, now for the long details... I've been on the road now for over a year since March 2020, camping around the lower 48 states to deal with COVID, while working remotely for a university. I live and breath by my cell service to connect to a dozen or more meetings and classes a week. During my tour, I've figured out how to find the best physical views and cell service. I knew I'd need a "boost" sometimes so I bought the Weboost Drive Reach in the beginning of my trip in 2020 and it was complete and total garbage. It never worked for me and in fact depreciated my signal and data speed. I was incredibly upset. I learned an important lesson about boosters through this though. Basically, your phone has multiple in and multiple out (MIMO) antennas. My laymen's understanding is that each of those antennas each draw in different speeds and add them up to give you the best signal and speed possible through your phone. Imagine this is like your two ears--whatever is in earshot of you gets picked up and processed in stereo and with greater detail. Weboost turns your MIMO antennas into one solo antenna and boosts that in and out signal to your phone. So it's like covering up one ear while putting a megaphone to the other. Again, I'm not an expert and I'm sure I got some of that wrong, but that's my sense after some research. In the end, you won't get the benefit of multiple antennas and likely won't get blazing speeds using Weboost (speed of course depends on other tower factors and frequencies). If you want a MIMO external antenna, you need a mobile hotspot with two antenna ports and then you can buy an external antenna to help pick up signal. This is more passive and is not "boosting". I wish Weboost had a MIMO option, that might be pretty rad but I'm sure there's a reason that doesn't exist. Also, the Drive Reach is omni directional so it may struggle with bouncing between towers, maybe hurting your chances of keeping a good connection. The Destination RV requires directing your external antenna to a general area where the closest tower, which helps maintain a direct connection. Lastly, and this is the kinda deceitful part by not making this a big BOLD warning about boosters in my opinion, YOU HAVE TO HAVE AT LEAST ONE BAR OF SIGNAL BEFORE BOOSTING FOR IT TO WORK!!! If you can't open a webpage without a booster, your booster likely won't help you at all. This was a biiiiiig revelation to me and hoepfully saves some people grief when deciding on whether to get a booster. Because of these issues and failed attempts with the Drive Reach reducing data speed, I threw it in a box never to be used again. Huge waste of money. From then on, I relied on being close enough to a tower with my phone to do my work. Come 2020, I found myself continuing my nomad life in my home state of California, which has decent signal in some areas but not great signal in a lot of areas I wanted to be in. So, I hopped on Amazon to see what's been developed since the Drive Reach and I found the Weboost Destination RV. I figured it likely wouldn't work because of my experience and thought, what would it hurt to buy it and just return it if it's a dud. I also read some poor reviews of their previous version of the RV destination and expected the worst. Man, was I wrong, thankfully! This thing really impressed me! I had it set up in about 30 minutes, extended it 25', pointed the external blade antenna to where I thought was a tower and low and behold I was getting two bars of 5g instead of one LTE and about 5mb of signal (side note: bars sometimes don't matter, I've gotten 70mb up and down on one bar of signal without a booster in some really remote areas likely because few people were using that tower). After testing the signal and speed a few times while trying to direct the external antenna, I was able to get what I think was maximum speed possible. After doing these tests while directly connected to the antenna and booster with the included cables, I decided to give a shot at trying to hook up the coax to the external satellite coax box towards the rear of my 2017 airstream, which has internal rg6 cabling built in, and it worked just as good as the new cables out of the box. I was very excited about that! Super clean setup (I'll add pics later when it's not dark). When I started my journey, I only had T-Mobile. But, because I was in a lot of places and the fact that each mobile carrier does better in some areas and worse in others, I opted to get Verizon on my iphone 12 pro (probably my suggested service if you do what I'm doing), T-Mobile on my iPad pro, and AT&T in my Toyo Tacoma. The Verizon boosting did great with the Destination RV boost, but the T-Mobile boost failed miserably (haven't tried AT&T yet). I'm starting to wonder if my initial Weboost woes were due to something related to T-Mobile throttling speeds when it senses it's being boosted? My current iPad with T-Mobile on the Destination RV booster is operating at about 0.2 mb, which is worse than off the booster and the same when I was using the Drive Reach. Sadly I lost the Reach in my travels and I'd test it with Verizon if I could. I'm really glad this thing is working at least on Verizon! I'll update with pics and a review after a few weeks and tests. [2 month update] Upgrading to 5-stars. It's still going strong and has allowed me to work weeks at a time (zoom calls, teaching, etc.) in spots that I definitely wouldn't have been able to work prior to getting the weboost. Dialing into a tower can be tricky, often I try to estimate where the closest tower is and then do several tests till I get optimal speed. I usually do small turns, run a test, do another turn, test, and keep doing that till I find the lowest and strongest signal. I mounted a compass on it to help me keep track my positions. Even with one bar improvement, I really increased my speed. I'm not sure what's up with T-Mobile but I think it's something on their end, hopefully it's just me, but I ended up dumping them all together and going with Verizon.