Recently i got me
a pair of bluetooth headphones, my purpose was to use them with my cell phone.
It came as a surprise that the sound was choppy (not sure if it's the right
word but the sound stutters). with the phone on my pocket and the earphones on
my head (yes i like to do it that way, i tried with the phone on my nose and
the earphones on my feet and, somehow, it didn't fell right). I checked
the earphones with my ipad and the range was correct, around 10m (that is 33
feet).
I suppose my cell
phone is the one to be blamed, it is a chinese made Zopo ZP980 (codenamed
Potato by my wife). So what are my choices?
On the first place
i decided to open up my phone and take a look.
 |
| This is where the antenna should be. |
##################WARNING-DISCLAIMER:
###########################
What you are about
to read will most likely render your phone useless, it's probably ilegal and
bamby's mother's killers1 are supposed to have performed
this procedure. Proceed at your own risk, i decline any responsability for the
damages.
########################################################################
After opening the
phone I saw where the antenna for the bluetooth (and wifi) was supposed to be.
there was a sticker (see picture) where the antenna was suppossed to be. The
antenna was absolutely useless (if you ask me that is not an antenna, only the
connection). Then i remembered that the wifi signal was between poor and worse.
if your phone
doesn't have an antenna what should you do, you should build yourself one.
what is the
wavelength of bluetooth?? Well, bluetooth's frequency is 2,3 GHz. That is
aprox. 13 cm, so a quarter wavelength would be 3 cm (1,2 inches). I took a
cable of 2,5 cm (1 inch) length (i suppossed that the track and connector will
make up for the 5 mm (0,2 inches) missing. The cable was sticked on the
connector (see pic), no soldering or glue was used.
That red wire is acting as a supplementary antenna!!!
|
The result on my
case YMMV2 was that both bluetooth's and
wifi's signal was boosted tenthfold.
Bluetooth is
useful at 9 m distance (10 yards) and wifi's usable on my whole home (before
the fix the signal died everywhere except the living, where the router is).
My results are
absolutely not scientific, i only tried on my cell. I should check bluettoth's
performance varying the length of the cable used as antenna and determine the
optimum's length. I will not do that because something that I have previously
probed is that tinkering too much with your electronics equipment wil end up
breaking it. I try to reduce my tinkering to a minimum.
The antenna length
would only be useful for this model because the cooper length on the circuit's
board should be taken into account.
the moral of the
story is that if your bluetooth's signal is very bad it could be blamed on the
antenna: defective or nonexistent. In that case it might be fixed (might, might
might) at home through a diy procedure. The one described above is extremely
simple but needs some basic skills that can break your phone.
Remember that you
probably can live without a bluetooth (or wifi) connection but you probably
won't be able to go through without a working phone.
Good luck and
please comment if you think the info was useful to you, specially if you can
reproduce the results (on this same model or other).
1 Sorry, in Spain Bambi's mother''s killers represent
everything that is evil.
2YMMV
- Your mileage may vary
