CellBooster FMCA

What does a CellBooster FMCA partnership mean for you? Well… If you happen to be one of the 8.9 Million households in the US that own an RV, quite a bit! And if you happen to be among the thousands that are members of the Family Motor Coach Association (FMCA) and subscribe to FMCA’s Tech Connect+ benefit package, even MORE!

Right now, subscribers to FMCA’s Tech Connect+ benefit package can receive a coupon code that will allow them to receive 15% off of any cell phone signal booster purchase from our online shop. So essentially, this CellBooster FMCA deal means more money in your pocket. And better connection to your loved ones while on the road.

You: “But what does this cell phone booster mumbo-jumbo mean, Rob?”

I’m glad you asked! These cell phone signal boosters are devices that are specifically designed to help you defeat cellular dead-zones during cross-country trips and off-the-grid overnight stays. A cellular signal booster will help provide crystal-clear call quality and improved data speeds on all North American cell carriers. These devices are specifically designed to work well in RVs.

You: “But what do you know about RVs, Rob?”

I’ll be honest, I have a pretty limited experience with motorhomes. This CellBooster FMCA deal hasn’t existed forever. In fact, let me tell you a story about my only RV experience!

Gramps and Mama RoRo

My dear grandma “Mama RoRo” and grandpa “Gramps” were the greatest grandparents in the WORLD! I loved them a ton. I’m still sad that they are no longer with us. Gramps was a laid-back, easy going man that would have done ANYTHING in his power to make Mama RoRo happy.

One of Mama RoRo’s sisters (my aunt Janet) and her husband (my uncle Frank) retired pretty early in life. Frank had spent many, many years working for one of the old Bell Companies, Mountain Bell. He was a good man! He actually taught me a lot about phone wiring that I would use later in my life when I worked as a phone system vendor putting myself through college. Buy anyway, when they retired, they spent the rest of their lives as “snowbirds”. They would spend the summers at their home in Ivins, Utah and then spend the winters in Yuma, Arizona. Apparently, they loved the heat, because a summer in Ivins, Utah, on the outskirts of the desert of Saint George was hardly a picnic in the summer months!

Eventually, when my grandparents retired, my Mama RoRo could think of nothing that she desired more than spend the rest of their lives as snowbirds. She longed travelling with her sister Janet, and spending their winters in Yuma, Arizona. It wasn’t Gramp’s idea of a great time, but his undying and utter devotion to my Mama RoRo meant that he was going to do WHATEVER she wanted to!

Road Trip

One year, on their way to Yuma, they stopped by Saint George and picked up a few grandkids to make the trek with them. Their motorhome was no palace. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But, it was all my Mama RoRo wanted and that was good enough for Gramps.

My cousins and I loaded into the motorhome and we started south on I-15. We sat in back, playing our games of “Go Fish” (my cousin Kellie is a cheater). When we neared the half-way point between the beginning and end of the Virgin River Gorge, we noticed the smoke. Being the family nerd, I could clearly tell that it was the smell of an electrical fire. This was the second time that one of my grandparent’s vehicles would try to kill me. (The first time was when I fell out of the back of their moving station wagon, but that’s a different story altogether. )

Gramps quickly pulled the motorhome to the side of the road, but it wasn’t quite quick enough. The engine compartment bellowed with smoke. And the interior was starting to fill with smoke as well, because the smoke was being sucked into the air conditioning. To make matters worse, I had thrown the fire extinguisher into the very back of the motorhome in an effort to keep my brother from “accidentally” hitting me with it anymore.

Needless to say, the vacation was a total loss. I’m not sure how the motorhome fared. We waited on the side of the road for my uncle to drive past. He had left a few hours after us. There weren’t cell phones in those days, and even if there had been, the middle of the Virgin River Gorge was no place to get cell phone service. Until now!

What Might Have Been

Had this incident occurred a decade later, we might have had a cell phone. We probably still wouldn’t have been able to make a call though. Have you ever been through the Virgin River Gorge? I think it’s a beautiful drive. One of my favorites!

The Virgin River Gorge on Interstate 15 is one of the costliest highways ever constructed. The road was created by blasting out miles of limestone and sandstone walls to create a more direct route from Saint George, Utah to Beaver Dam, Arizona. The towering, beautiful canyon walls are definitely a visual distraction for the winding road. Getting cell phone signal at the base of these massive cliffs is a true challenge.

Now, I have never been important enough to be on a cell phone call while driving the length of the Virgin River Gorge, but I have a friend who definitely is. He claims that where he would normally have to end his calls before entering the gorge, with his cell phone booster, he is now able to carry his calls through most of the gorge. There are still two spots where he will drop his call, but for the most part, he is able to keep his calls alive through there.

So… (back to my story) if my motorhome experience had been decades later, and Gramps had a cell phone signal booster for his motorhome, we might not have had to sit on the side of the road for HOURS waiting for my uncle to drive by. But alas, hindsight is always 20/20.

Don’t Count Me Out

This motorhome experience hasn’t completely soured me. I would love to own one some day. That’s where YOU come in! If you buy tons of cell phone signal boosters from my shop, I will be able to buy one soon. *wink wink* Maybe I’ll even be able to pick up a sweet rig like my Uncle Jim’s. (At 15% off thanks to this CellBooster FMCA deal)

Someday I will be able to enjoy the open road. I’ll throw my wife and bazillion kids into the back of my rig, and we will have a BLAST! Of course, the kids will fight and argue, they will make me regret every minute of driving. But when we get there… the view will be AWESOME! And we will have great cell phone service, wherever we go, because I will definitely have a cell phone signal booster like this Fusion2Go 3.0 RV Kit! If only I’d known about the CellBooster FMCA thing a few years earlier.

What is CellBooster.us?

In order to determine what CellBooster.us is, we need to take a journey back in time… like WAY back.

*cue: Staying Alive by the Bee Gees*

The year was 1978! Space Invaders was revolutionizing the video game industry,  Saturday Night Fever was packing theaters, and Jimmy Carter, the simple peanut farmer from Georgia, was obliterating the US economy. While Poncherello and Baker were keeping the fictional highways of California safe, far away, in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, my mother was hunched over a porcelain throne evacuating the contents her stomach. What she thought was a serious case of the flu ended up being the greatest gift she could ever hope to receive. For behold, She was pregnant. With me!

I wasn’t the mouth-breathing jock my dad hoped that I’d be. That being said, I wasn’t COMPLETELY uncoordinated, but I wasn’t going to be Kobe Bryant… mostly because he was 6 months older than me, and growing up in Philadelphia. I was smart. I liked to take stuff apart, see how it worked, and try to put it back together. In fact, My dad was a travelling salesman. He sold inventory to video stores across the western US, and I was his VHS video fixer guy. I was apparently born with “The Knack” (as foretold in this Dilbert Clip)

Making it Official

In 2003-ish (I think), I decided to come out of the nerd closet, of sorts, and make it official. My lovely wife was sick of me changing my major, and I finally received my Bachelor’s Degree in Electronics Engineering Technology from Weber State University. I took my first job out of school as a broadcast engineer in what had become my home town (Saint George, UT).

My boss was great, but his son-in-law (who had magically, all of a sudden, learned all there was to know about business) had just taken over as the manager. We didn’t see eye-to-eye. When I expressed my concerns, (in a tirade of vocabulary with enough color to make a Leonid Afremov painting look like a Van Gogh) I was subsequently dismissed. I had been fired before (by my dad, like 800 times… we didn’t see eye-to-eye) when I had worked my summers with him in construction (he was back to being an ironworker now). It was beginning to dawn on me that maybe I wasn’t cut out for working for an employer (is anyone else sensing a pattern here?). So, I decided to go out on my own.

 One Man Wolfpack

I put myself through college installing and servicing phone systems. Now, I was going to do it on my own, full-time. So, I started my own business and for several years I was pretty successful. I branched into home theaters, security systems and home automation. Things were good! And… That’s when the economy tanked.

I came home from work one day, after spending all day trying to drum up some more business, and my wife had my church suit laid out on the edge of the bed. She sat me down and informed me that I had a job interview tomorrow and that it was in my best interests to make sure that I secured the job.

Naturally, with my striking good looks, my winning smile, and my overwhelming humility, I got the job. And thus began, the portion of my life that I refer to as “The Wilson Years”.

The Wilson Years

Prior to this point in my life, I hadn’t used much of my Electronics Engineering Degree. This job at Wilson Electronics (now WeBoost), would change all that. I began to do a lot of RF engineering and I absolutely LOVED it! Cell phone signal boosters were a very interesting product. Our WeBoost signal boosters were intricately designed and carefully thought out. Cell phone boosters was an underserved market and there was a huge potential for growth. I had stock options! And, of course, Wilson (WeBoost) signal boosters were easily the best products on the market. I spent considerable time testing and comparing our amplifiers to all others on the market and we dominated that market! Somehow, I was a member of the best cell phone signal booster engineering team in the world.

Face For Radio

When I was younger, I worked for several years in my local market as a radio announcer. When our owner found out that I had been in radio, and because I was so incredibly handsome, I became the “face” of Wilson Electronics. Visiting the website would submit you to myself explaining all of the different places that you could click on our website to find our different products. I was moved to the marketing department, resigned to make installation and comparison videos for the rest of my life.

So here I was, stuck in the marketing department. An engineer by birth, working as a talking head. My coworkers were AMAZING! I met a ton of really great people (more about them later), but RF Engineering is my passion, and as you can imagine, I wasn’t happy.

I had just finished reading some book about the universe or something and I had decided that I was going to move myself back to the engineering department. So, I picked up all my stuff, and I moved back into my old desk and gave myself a few projects. I felt that Wilson wasn’t innovating enough, and I decided to write a manifesto to share my thoughts on the future of the company. It was titled: “Wilson’s Future and LTE.” Apparently, the owners didn’t feel the same way that I did, and I was let go for being (and I QUOTE): “Too forward thinking and not conducive to the environment.”

Happy Trails

Apparently, when you are let go from a job, your stock options don’t go with you. A little while after I left, our owner sold the company to a capital firm and made a GRUNDLE of money. I am truly, very happy for him, he was a great mentor and boss. All of the other engineers in the company made hundreds of thousands of dollars from their stock options… And that’s when I realized that maybe I should just learn to keep my damn opinions to myself.

Anyways, I have managed to keep myself working with RF ever since I started at Wilson all those years ago (except for the year that I was working night shifts at the hotel to make ends meet after I was fired). But, things always seem to work out how they are supposed to, and I find myself in a good place now. My friends at Wilson (WeBoost), however, were not. The capital firm that took over WeBoost couldn’t seem to get a few things figured out. From what I hear, the environment over there became a little, what the Spanish would call “pesado”-  heavy. Not fun anymore.

You mean, THAT SureCall?

Some time ago, a few of my good friends from the Wilson days were approached by the owner of SureCall. They met with Hong, the owner of SureCall, and they were considering jumping ship to a better environment. I profusely warned them against it, because in my capacity at Wilson (WeBoost) I had tested many a SureCall cellular signal booster, and I noticed that they were not great. They were actually kind of terrible. Naturally, I didn’t want my buddies to go to work for a company with a terrible product.

Fast forward many years. I had one of my SureCall peeps call me and ask me if I, being an engineer, would mind testing a few SureCall products. They wanted to see how they stacked up to the competition (WeBoost). I quickly agreed because I now had the chance to prove to them how they had made the biggest mistake of their lives by moving to Wilson’s (WeBoost’s) competitor. It was going to be sweet, sweet vindication. I got out my recipe book and opened it to my “humble pie” recipe. And I was all too willing to feed it to them. Little did I know, the recipe that I was actually cooking was for crow.

Conversion

I know it’s taken me a long while to get to the point, if any of you are still here, know that I was absolutely AMAZED at SureCall’s performance. I had tested them before years ago, and they were nothing to write home about. But now, they are incredible. I tested them thoroughly and compared them side by side with the Wilson (WeBoost) comparison products.

The SureCall signal boosters stacked up so well, in fact, that I HAD to become a dealer. I needed to start selling them for myself. So, I jumped onto godaddy, registered myself a domain (CellBooster.us) and put together a site. CellBooster was founded for an almost evangelical purpose. I need to get the word out: “there is an EXCELLENT alternative to the overpriced WeBoost products out there.”

Also, I feel some kind of “spirit animal” connection to the folks there at SureCall. I am an entrepreneur at heart. I’ve built a businesses or two (or three) before and I’ve experienced all of the emotions that go along with that calling. SureCall has a passion for building great products. Their goal is to assemble a first-class team and sell their cellular signal boosters to the world. I can easily identify with that mantra.

My name is Rob and I’m a SureCall convert. I hope that you will become converted yourself. And if you decide to purchase a cell phone signal booster, I hope that CellBooster.us is where you’ll decide to buy it.

Which reminds me: You can visit our store here!

Thanks for stopping by!

Rob Richey – Cellbooster.us