Weak cell signal? Here's your answer.

Until recently, Trey Bulloch and I spent a lot of time yelling at each other. Not out of anger, just simple necessity. Trey, a crop consultant based in Hattiesburg, Miss., works in a part of Mississippi that isn’t all that compatible with cellular communications.

The person who gave me Trey’s cell phone number a couple of years ago warned me, “He spends most of his time in cell-phone hell.”

I soon found out what that meant.

Calling Trey almost always resulted in fuzzy and garbled signals and one or two dropped calls during a normal conversation. People around me would close their office doors when I got on the phone with Trey because I was so loud that they couldn’t hear themselves think.

Trey works almost exclusively south of Interstate 20, a part of Mississippi with rolling and hilly terrain and vast stretches of thickly planted pine trees. A friend who did a stint in the cell-phone industry said that “except for mountains, pine trees are nature’s best insulator of cell phone signals.”

The resin, he explained, absorbs signals nearly as well as it sticks to your skin.

Along with the hills and the pine trees, cell towers are sparcely located in parts of south Mississippi. There just aren’t enough people in some places to ramp up the service connections.

So, it was surprising the first time I called Trey this season and found that the connection was nearly as clear as if he had been on a land line. I mentioned that to him, and he said that since last season he had invested in an amplifier that turns his half-watt digital phone into a three-watt phone. If you’re old enough, you may remember the three-watt days when most cell phones came in bags or they were hard-wired into your vehicle. Three-watt phones are still permissible, but with so many towers in most places now and the shift to digital and handheld units, nobody markets three-watt models anymore.

But you can buy amplifiers or boosters.

Trey’s came from SmoothTalker (http://smoothtalker.com), a Canadian company that manufactures and markets booster and antenna packages designed to add that extra 2.5 watts to many digital phones. According to the company’s web site, its digital phone boosters were the first ones ever approved by the U.S. FCC. The price starts at about $300, and kits are available that can be installed or moved from vehicle to vehicle.

On one hand, it seems like a lot to pay. But Trey doesn’t operate in the wide open spaces of, say, the Mississippi Delta or California’s San Joaquin Valley. Like most crop consultants, his pickup is his office, and it was worth the price to gain this much improvement in his telephone connection.

“There are places I can talk to my farmers now where it was impossible before,” says Trey, who works in cotton and is also Mississippi’s most experienced peanut consultant. “On one stretch of U.S. 61 between Port Gibson and Vicksburg, I don’t know of any company that provides adequate service for a regular cell phone. But I don’t have any trouble along there now.”

One quirk: at times, the boosted signal may find its way to rather distant towers, and a moving signal may not be seamlessly handed off from one tower (or cell) to another. If he’s driving along a highway, Trey says, his phone might show a solid five-bar signal, then it suddenly drops off to nothing.

“A second later, it jumps up to five bars again when another tower picks it up,” he says. “In that case, it’s better just to pull over when you have a good signal, rather than let the phone try to figure out which tower to use.”

The SmoothTalker system requires the use of a privacy handset. The handset and external antenna are interchangeable among many phones, Trey points out, but the boosters are designed for only certain models and/or cellular carriers.

“If you have to replace your phone later, that could limit you on which phone to buy,” he says. “Otherwise, you might have to buy a new booster, which is the main cost.”