Your phone is likely a critical part of your car: It can be how you get directions, listen to music, and stay in contact for safety. This means running into dead zones can be really frustrating, but signal boosters can help with that. At $199.99, the Drive Sleek by WeBoost (a brand of Wilson Electronics) is the least expensive high-quality signal booster you can buy. It can stretch the range of a cell tower by at least another mile, giving you that little bit of extra boost you need to keep going while on the road, and earning our Editors' Choice in the process.
How Signal Boosters Work
All signal boosters work the same way. They collect signal through a much larger antenna than the one in your phone; process, clean and amplify it; and then re-radiate it either through a cradle that holds one device, or using a panel that can cover a whole vehicle or house. Signal boosters designed for the US have been cleared by the FCC to radiate at safe levels and not to interfere with carrier towers.
The Drive Sleek uses a small, magnetized antenna on top of your car
In general, signal boosters amplify 2G through 4G signal for all carriers, on common, long-used frequency bands. You'll also find some improvement in AT&T low-band 5G performance, although not in T-Mobile low or mid-band 5G because those frequencies aren't supported by boosters.
One Phone, Three Parts
The Sleek boosts one phone, which you put in an adjustable cradle on or near your center console. The booster has three main parts. There's a fin antenna that magnetizes to the top of your car. It's connected by a wire to the actual booster, which uses Velcro to attach under the back passenger seat. You run a wire under the seat and up to your center console, where you either mount the cradle itself using an adhesive disk, or have it clip to one of your A/C vents. I'd definitely go with the vent clip, at least during the summer; my OnePlus 8 Pro phone sometimes overheated in full sunlight, but putting it on the A/C vent kept it nice and cool. Another wire goes to the power adapter, which plugs into your 12V cigarette lighter port.
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The actual booster sticks under a rear seat
The power adapter doesn't have a switch on it; to turn the booster on or off, you plug or unplug it. I found it very easy to unplug, so that wasn't a big deal. The adapter has a USB-A port in it to charge your phone, if you aren't already charging it from your car. A small white light at the top of the cradle shows whether it's on or off.
The wire from the fin antenna into the car doesn't prevent your door from closing, but it's a bit messy-looking. Taping it down helps.
The rubberized cradle holds your phone very securely, which I found to be a big advantage of the Sleek over SureCall's N-Range booster. By gripping the top and bottom, rather than the sides, it keeps the phone straight, and the vent mount doesn’t wobble.
Here's everything in the package
Something for Everyone
These single-device vehicle boosters don't radiate signal. They only enhance the signal of the one phone that's in the cradle, so folks in the back seat are out of luck. If you need a whole-vehicle solution you should step up to WeBoost's Drive X ($399.99), which has a larger booster unit and a broadcasting panel that sits on your center console.
The Drive Sleek supports bands 2/4/5/12/13/17. That gets you more range on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon with a big exception. If you're in an area that primarily has T-Mobile's band 71 (600MHz), as many rural areas do, there's no consumer booster that can improve that coverage. Boosters also can't help with band 41, which will be T-Mobile's primary band for fast, suburban 5G. Testing the booster in rural upstate New York, I found that it boosted my band 5 coverage on AT&T; bands 2 and 12 on T-Mobile; and band 13 on Verizon.
For more on how mobile phones measure signal strength, and what a good signal is, check out the chart in our SureCall Flare 3.0 review.
The signal improvement was impressive. Both the Drive Sleek and the SureCall N-Range advertise up to 23dB signal improvement, but I saw better performance with the Drive Sleek. In five different locations, I saw a 14-22dBm improvement in RSRP, better than I generally saw with the SureCall N-Range booster. On Verizon, that translated to improving 2.2Mbps download speeds to 22Mbps, or improving 26.3Mbps download speeds to 43.6Mbps. The booster pulled LTE signal in what my Samsung Galaxy S20+ phone alone had seen as a 3G-only zone, grabbing -102dBm signal and 21Mbps download speeds.
The cable hangs down a bit as it enters the car; you probably want to tape it down
Upload speeds didn't benefit nearly as much. The booster took a 30Kbps upload speed and turned it to 500Kbps, still very slow; in that case, the connection would be good for texts and data, but I'd be concerned about keeping a call solid. Another connection that went from a 700Kbps upload speed to 6Mbps was a much more significant difference.
On T-Mobile, the booster improved a -106dBm, band 2 signal to -92dBm, a 14dB difference. But the real wonder is what it did to improve band 12 coverage in upstate New York, where it's T-Mobile's dominant long-range coverage band. The booster was able to pull -100 or -101dBm with speeds of 8-10Mbps out of areas where the phone was otherwise reporting zero coverage, extending the range of a band 12 tower an extra three-quarters of a mile to a mile. That may not sound like a lot, but it makes a considerable difference when cell towers aren't entirely absent from a region, they're just too far apart.
A Reliable Driving Companion
Cradle-based single-device boosters are the least expensive way to boost your phone's signal. You can even hook one up in your house by getting an inexpensive cigarette lighter-to-wall-plug adapter from Amazon, running the external antenna out a window, and sticking it to the side of your house. They're considerably less powerful than the more expensive home boosters, and of course they only boost the phone that's in the cradle at the time.
The WeBoost Drive Sleek and Surecall's N-Range 2.0 are the two least expensive boosters on the market, and the Drive Sleek is the better of the two. I found that it boosted signals by a slightly larger amount, but more importantly, I found its cradle to be more secure and less fiddly when it comes to gripping the phone. Those qualities are enough to earn the Drive Sleek our Editor's Choice as an inexpensive signal booster for 4G.
WeBoost Drive Sleek
Editors' Choice
Cons
The Bottom Line
WeBoost's Drive Sleek securely holds your phone in the car and boosts cellular signal for all three US carriers.
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Further Reading
The Link LonkJuly 28, 2020 at 09:17PM
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WeBoost Drive Sleek Review - PCMag
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