Has anybody connected an external antenna to the Fairphone 2 ? If not, I am interested to know where the GSM1800 antenna sits and what type of antenna it is.
I do have extremely poor reception in our house. I do not want to use one of these cheap signal boosters because that would mean risking my ham license because they are illegal 
I do not know anything about this, but how do you want to connect the external antenna to the FP2? Does this work with Micro-USB and if so what kind of software do you need to get it running since I assume that Android does not support it?
As the antenna is part of the analog RF circuit, USB or any type of software cannot connect to it.
The only way I can see to “connect” would be via contact less inductive or capacitive coupling. In order to create a well working coupler I do need to know where the antenna is located in the phone and what type it is (dipole, panel or end-fed with human body as counterpoise). Being a radio amateur I do have a couple of ideas that could probably improve signal without the need of any dubious and very likely illegal amplifiers:
- use an external directional (yagi-uda) antenna with a cable going into the house and to the coupler attached to the phone. The gain of the yagi compensates part of the signal loss through coupler and cable.
- make the phone itself part of the antenna by placing it at the feed point of a yagi. I can see a simple construction of a wooden bar with a stand for the phone where you would find the active dipole on a “traditional” yagi. The parasitic elements (reflector and directors) would be made of simple pieces of wire attached to the wooden plank.
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