2010 News Archive

Clear some room in your suitcase, the 5BARz Road Warrior is coming along. Delivering up to 20x faster Internet and clear calls in dead zones, the 5BARz Road Warrior is the industry’s first affordable, portable plug ‘n play cell signal extender. The 5BARz Road Warrior can be used from any location where power is available, including the car, office, hotel room, or home. The unit is easy to use and requires no rooftop or window antennas with the ability to boost multiple devices in the same area.
Everyone has experienced the frustration of trying to call their significant other or boss to check in while away and not being able to get service. If the most basic purpose of a cell phone or other handheld device is to communicate, shouldn’t this basic function be preserved regardless of where you are located?

As any avid traveler knows, when on the road, being connected to your life at home is just as important as having your credit card. When you are in unfamiliar territory, the signal strength for your smartphone isn’t the same as in your hometown. Travelers spend a great deal of time trying to connect to and use their devices–this constant disturbance caused by spotty coverage can really take away from your travel experience. The biggest problem may not be the connection itself, it’s that people are accepting this frustration as a way of life.

5BARz can take away the frustrating experience of frequent dropped calls and dread-zones. Bring along the 5BARz Road Warrior and enjoy your travels with the comfort and confidence of being connected wherever your adventure may take you.

While the National Broadband Plan seeks ways to deliver service to rural U.S. areas, there are plenty of city dwellers plagued with spotty service, even within the same house. Carriers have offered fixed-base units for home use called Femto cells, but a small company located in southern California offers the first portable device designed for consumers.

The CelLynx 5BARz Road Warrior can be used with any carrier and with any device to extend a cell phone signals to their maximum five bars.

The current demand for new bandwidth-hungry devices is outpacing the carriers' ability to feed them. Cisco says mobile traffic has gone up 160 percent within the past year and more than 20 percent of US households have given up their landlines in favor of cell phones. With growing reliance on mobile devices, strong signals become critical.

"You might have five bars over there on your cell phone and only three bars in the next room," CelLynx chief marketing officer Barry George said. Anyone who has walked around the house or out to the furthest corner of the yard trying to find just the right spot for reception knows how annoying this problem can be.

"We guarantee five bars of signal strength anywhere you have a signal, even if that signal is too weak to make a call," George told TechNewsDaily. "And you get your maximum data throughput."

The company's 5BARz technology extends even the weakest signals to full signal strength, and make Internet speeds as much as 20 times faster, George says, including 3G in areas with weak coverage. The result: fewer dropped calls, better reception, and faster mobile Internet.

The 5BARz Road Warrior is designed for portability. It can be used from any location where power is available, requires no rooftop or window antennas, and can provide a full signal to up to five devices. Once the connection has been made, users may wander away from the device. Any 12-volt outlet will work, including those in cars and boats.

"Signals bounce a long way on the water, but boaters can't hold it," George said. "5BARz gives five bars even out on the water, [which is] especially good in case of emergency or if you just need to know when dinner is." George also uses his 5BARz at airline gates, spots notorious for no coverage.

The Road Warrior provides full signal strength to multiple devices. It is "carrier agnostic" meaning it will work with any wireless carrier signal and with any device using a cellular signal. Priced at $299 with no additional service charge.

Cellynx will release fixed-based products which will provide a signal throughout an entire home later this year. 

LiveScience.com Leslie Meredith
technewsdaily Senior Writer
Thu Apr 15, 10:06 am ET

Spring break is just around the corner! Join us this week as we look at all sorts of fun and useful gadgets that will make it easier than ever to hit the road for a much deserved respite from wintry doldrums, from cell phone accessories to auto maintenance tools and even biking gear. We would love to hear about your spring break plans, drop us a line and let us know where you’re headed, and we hope that you enjoy your trip!

To start off we’re going to look at a gizmo that will not only make traveling easier, but could potentially make your time at home less frustrating as well, particularly if you happen to reside in a weak or dead spot for cellular reception. We’re talking about the CelLynx 5barz Road Warrior, a cellular signal booster to use in your car. We’ve looked at other signal boosters before, but never one designed specifically to fit in your car. 5barz makes some pretty lofty claims, guaranteeing increased signal strength in any area where a cellular signal exists, and we were anxious to see if they could deliver.

The Road Warrior is roughly the size of a paperback book, and has three parts to it; the base, the cradle and the power cord/antenna, which plugs into a 12V cigarette lighter. Right away we were fans of the fact that there was no external antenna required, and that it works with every carrier in the US (except iDEN phones used by Nextel, and TMobile’s 3G services). We were able to test it out with both our iPhone 3G and with a Blackberry Storm 9530, on Verizon and ATT, both EDGE and 3G.

Oddly enough some of the worst dead spots we encounter are not in the country, but in the densest parts of San Francisco while driving around. Apparently tall buildings and huge hills are not conducive to great cellular signals! So, risking life and limb, we bravely hit the streets of San Francisco for you, dear readers. Note: we did not use the phone while driving, but safely pulled over when a dead zone was discovered. We found that even on the streets where we have consistently dropped to 1 or 2 bars, we retained signal and didn’t drop as many calls- down to around 5% or so from 20%, with only the occasional cut-out. In addition we found that webpage loading time on the iPhones were faster when using the Road Warrior, a definite plus. There was no discernible difference between the performance of the Road Warrior with the iPhone and the Blackberry Storm. The major downside is that the phone must stay in the cradle for it to work, so a Bluetooth headset is highly recommended.

Now, just to be clear, there must be a signal- the Road Warrior won’t create a signal where none is present. So, for those of you planning on heading to remote areas where there may not be cellular coverage, cell phone boosters likely won’t work for you- they can’t make something out of nothing. The other caveat is that regardless of how boosted your signal is, calls that are dropped or won’t go through due to congestion on the cellular network can’t be avoided.

In the interest of thorough investigation, we also gave the Road Warrior a try in a fixed location the office, which is in an old, tall, brick building in the heart of San Francisco. It would be fair to say that every staff member has spent their fair share of time down in the lobby or outside (even in the winter) trying to get a stable signal to make a call on. For as well as it works in the car, there was a whole office full of doubters as to the Road Warrior’s ability to make the office a viable place to make a cell phone call. We were all amazed and delighted that we were able to go from one bar to four bars, and were able to make calls from anywhere in the room that the base was in. (In the past we’ve had some luck with a signal booster, but it required sitting in a fairly specific spot right next to the base.) What a great thing, to be able to move around a room freely and not fear that the call will disconnect with a wrong step!

Currently you can order the Road Warrior from a list of sellers, and you can expect to pay around $300.

http://www.trulyobscure.com/article/597/on-the-road-with-cellynx-5barz

CelLynx has come out with a new product, the Road Warrior. It is a cell phone booster for in-vehicle or in-home use, protocol-independent and covers the frequency bands used in the USA.

The Road Warrior consists of two major components and some accessories. The two main components are the universal device holder with built-in antenna and a transmit/receive module. The two are connected by coaxial cable with an MCX antenna connector. The accessories are a DC power cable for the users device, an iGo tip is required to make the connection, and an AC/DC converter for in building use.

Installation was quick and easy, the universal holder is attached to a gooseneck that has a 12V cigarette lighter adaptor that plugs into the jack on your dashboard. The coaxial cable connects to the T/R module. Place the device into the holder, turn it on, and that is it. When the T/R module initializes, the blue LEDs illuminate. At that point the connection has been established.

There was a noticeable difference in signal strength using the BlackBerry Storm in the cradle. Signal strength usually is three to four bars when in its normal cradle, with the Road Warrior enabled it went to five bars. Drive testing through known weak signal areas proved that the device was working well. In places where a call drops or signal fade causes errors, the Road Warrior was able to hold the signal longer and in some cases save a normally dropped call.

Portability from vehicle-to-vehicle is simple, unplug the 12V connection and move. Mentioned earlier, the kit also comes with an AC/DC converter so that the unit can be used inside a home or office. During tests, the signal coverage was improved in known weak spots inside a building. The phone must stay in the cradle for it to work, so a Bluetooth headset is highly recommended.

Using the device did produce some interesting "side effects". Battery life was greatly improved, and more than one device benefited from the cradle's position. Two phones in the vehicle both had improved performance. The one in the cradle had better performance; the second device was within a foot of the cradle.

This device will only work where there is a cell signal present; it won’t create one where one does not exist!

The kit is retailing for US$299, with an optional magnetic mount exterior antenna available for an additional US$39.

http://phonereport.info/review-5barz-road-warrior/

We all know, Inflight Entertainment is quickly becoming an experience that is supplemented on the ground (and many times in the air) by an assortment of devices, the most notable of which, is the iPhone. A lot of road warriors rely on smart phones for entertainment, telephony, and data. The telephony part is the focus of this Hot Topic and the seemingly lack of consistent voice connectivity is the problem we set out to solve. Enter 5BARz from CelLynx, the mobile/fixed, cell phone solution. Simply put, the 5BARz Road Warrior (product image)pumped-up any and every telephone signal to 5 bars on our phones. If there was a signal (and sometimes where there wasn’t one), 5BARz found it and connected our iPhone every time. Seldom do we test a product that works so effectively but this gadget is really worth the bucks, after all, what is a dropped call worth?

Technically, the 5BARz solution is a femtocell (Access Point Base Station) and it simply increases the effective range of your cell phone by “relaying” the existing signal, amplifying it, and coupling the output to your phone, thus raising the signal level (5 bars – get it?). Current femtocell solutions are only one-carrier service and are not portable like the 5BARz. The system is really simple – two units (base station/receive antenna) and phone cradle. After hooking them up and dropping in our iPhone, need we say it – five bars in a home location that previously produced barely one bar…and at times, zero bars! The unit is also portable, and it is this feature that we had to test. With a cigarette lighter gooseneck attached to the phone cradle and the base station on the dash, we started our testing on the road where dropouts are notorious. After 4 exhaustive 100 mile trip tests up and down Interstate 5 near Seattle, we were amazed that there were consistently 5 bars everywhere…and nary a dropped call. We tested the unit with 5 different phones and 3 service providers with no difference. Suffice it to say, dropped calls will still occur because of network congestion, however, we did not experience one during our testing, affirming the value of the system and the relative improvement to the phone radio.

From a technology viewpoint, the antenna design in the base station is quite small and first rate. Employing a patented PIFA (Planar-Inverted-F-Antenna) design (the kind used in microstrip applications) is perfect for compact products like this. It covers the full US cellular and PCS bands and we found no difference in signal strength between carriers. Cellynx has patented an “active stability loop” to improve the isolation obtained between two co-located antennas, thereby allowing higher gain in a bi-directional amplifier (or repeater) system. You have probably heard the squeal from an audio system amplifier when a microphone gets to close to a speaker. This phenomenon is commonly called feedback. Similarly, there is an inherent problem with having receive and a transmit antennas close together with a signal booster in-between; if the antennas are too close to one another a feedback oscillation would occur unless the booster can be adjusted to prevent the feedback oscillation. The 5BARz Road Warrior self adjusts to prevent a feedback oscillation by turning down its gain – the ability to boost a signal. The base station is about the size of a couple packs of cigarettes and is placed on the dashboard. A small dipole antenna in the phone cradle couples the signal to your phone. And yes, you have to use a headset because the phone must be in the close proximity to the cradle to get the signal boost. Small price to pay for connectivity! Use it in your car or in your hotel room. If you have a need to stay connected, this is the only active way we have found to make our iPhone work. Heck, they ought to package one with each phone.