Different variants of this product name (“Drive Reach Extreme Marine”) are simply marketing terms for packages of additional accessories sold with the Drive Reach. They don’t make a marine package, but some of their distributors do bundle it with marine antennas. The Drive Reach is the booster itself – the red finned component plus some basic accessories – and the manufacturer packages it with components targeted at cars, trucks, RVs, or land homes – but not boats.

The WeBoost Drive Reach is their latest model and what you want – but from there it gets confusing with many variants of this package and many different distributors you can buy it from. The WeBoost seems to be the leading player in the cellular booster market for boats, RVs and probably more. You’re installing an outside antenna to pick up a weak cell tower signal and amplify it through a second antenna inside your boat for a slightly stronger signal. It doesn’t run on any particular cellular service and the best way to think of it is as a miniature cell tower repeater in your boat.

Before I knew anything about boosters I had a few misconceptions – so you should know: you don’t have to plug your device (phone, router) into the booster and you don’t need a SIM card for it. I’ll be focusing more on the latest install details plus logistics of where to actually buy this thing from.įirst, what is a booster? In simple terms it’s a device that enhances your cellular signal. It’s worth noting previous excellent writing has been done on this at. There are very few anchorages like that in the San Juans, but there are some in BC and Alaska.

While a decent external router / antenna does the job in anchorages where we have okay cell tower reception, a booster does the job in places where we have a very weak signal or barely usable speeds. Now we’re doing the next logical step which is to add a cellular booster. In a previous post back in August I talked about how we added a cellular router to our boat and hinted we’d probably be doing more soon.

We boost antenna