Metal materials and wireless reception

[Stephen Tashiro]

A person can put a lot of metal materials in a house nowadays: metal studs, metal lathe, metal roofing, metal beams. How far can you go before you begin to interfere with using a cell phone inside the house or using a wireless telephone or receiving the internet from your wireless router?

[Ken Fitzgerald]

It will vary...from house to house and room to room.

It will vary depending on your location with respect to the surrounding towers.

My house is typical '60s stick built. I have two identical clocks that are supposed to sync with WWV....I can place either one of them in our kitchen...they sync fine with the National Bureau of Standards. I place either one of them in our master bedroom..sometimes they do....sometimes they don't. It is dependent the metal outside your home too.

[Logan William]

The house I just bought has steel siding and my cell phone reception is significantly impaired inside the house and I feel its due to the siding. Outside I get pretty good service but I have 2 sweet spots inside the house, besides for those spots usage is pretty much impossible without going crazy. I'm looking at some cell extenders(similar to a wifi access point) to hopefully boost my signal inside the house.

[Dan Friedrichs]

I don't think there's any hope of predicting it. I was in a faraday-cage shielded room a few weeks ago (a room that housed an MRI machine, actually), and my cell phone still worked :confused:. Last week, I was in a magnetically-shielded room (doubled Mu-metal walls) for a different kind of medical scanner, and with the door open, my phone worked. But the number of flat, open spaces without coverage...

[David G Baker]

A house I owned in California had foil covered insulation in all of the walls, the ability to use rf equipment indoors was not very good.