Galaxy S4 internal antenna disabled...HELP!

[John Steger]

Hey all, I have a Galaxy S4 and live in a rural area. At my house I get very poor reception. A couple nights ago I was at my friends house and we were talking about reception and he said he had same problem and uses an external antenna at home and gets great signal. I told him my phone didnt have a external port. Long story short...I was doing something and he took phone out of case and started screwing with my phone. he opened it up and found a port inside and tried to hook up his external antenna to phone. Now I get NO signal...NOTHING! I tried taking sim out and replacing,turned phone off and back on....didnt work. Got home and looked it up only to find out this is a DONT DO thing. Apparently this disables the internal antenna. How do I fix? What can be done to use my phone ? HELP?

 

[John Steger]

Really? Nothing? I have it somewhat rigged with a wire in the antenna port and get poor signal but wire heats up when I turn mobile data on. Need a decent fix.

 

[Rukbat]

How go d a friend is he? He broke your phone. Now you have to decide which is more important to you - the friendship or the price of repairing the phone. Someone is going to have to pay a repair shop to fix it (probably by replacing the motherboard). The internal antenna port is for factory testing, not for end-user use.

The wire probably heats up because it's not 12.236cm long. An antenna isn't just a wire, it's a wire that's resonant at the frequency it's bring used at. But even shortening the wire isn't a fix, it's a band-aid.