Despite the warnings attached to earlier posts I went ahead and had the celfi go marine pack installed. Then we cruised around the Whitsunday islands in nth Queensland. The winds were ne to se so we stayed in anchorages suitable. These are anchorages we are familiar with and have poor to next to no signal. The type where you can,t send even a text message but occasionally one comes in during the night while the phone is on charge. Some a little better, some a little worse
As I have no technical ability I did as recommended by Jeffery S in his post 15. I did however convert one of the iPhones to show the signal in -dBm in lieu of bars just to see the differences. In the Whitsundays area the 3G band is superior to 4G. So I focused on 3G .
We had several phones, iPads etc on board and as might be expected they all recorded pretty much the same signal strength. Also the signals were largely consistent in the flybridge, saloon and cockpit. The boat is a fibreglass flybridge power boat of loa 60 feet. The external antenna is on the flybridge roof and the internal antenna is about 4 m below the base of the external antenna. I have the wave app which provides a lot of reading the meaning of which I little idea so I concentrated on the what the phone and iPads showed as suggested by Jeffery S.
Anchorage 1 : unit off reading -118dBm/ 1 bar. Unit on reading -95/3bars. (There was some fluctuation as boat swung)
Anchorage 2,3,and 4 were better averaging : unit off -114dBm/1bar. Unit on -86dBm/ 4bars.
The final test was that in addition to watching the signals was making clear phone calls. We were able to download BOM weather forecasts, rain radar, make flight bookings and do some internet banking transaction. All the things we were unable to do in these locations before the installation of the celfi.
This info is probably of not much use to the TF members in the US and Canada as the unit is only available in Australia.
To Isequent, I think you are going to be pleased with your purchase when you get up north.
And I've thrown the packaging away.